Rocket Cat II

Another good reason why cats shouldn't be equipped with jet packs. You never know when it will sense the next door neighbors opening the cat food packet that they're using to win your cats affection.

Asterix & Obelix

I believe the series is mostly refered to as Asterix. But I feel it's mean leaving out Obelix. My earliest memory of my grandma is me sitting next to her with an Asterix (& Obelix) book, pointing at the speech bubbles asking her what they said. The best was "Whats that one say?" "...Aaaaargh, get them."
If you ever saw the animated versions, forget them, they suck compared to the comics. One of the most tragic moments was when I realized that Goscinny died. It was a sudden blow and I wasn't prepared for it. That the writer of the comic had died 11 years before I was even born. Uderzo, the artist, carried on without him. New Asterix books still come out intermittently. I doubt I have read the latest one, but from what I have seen of the recent ones, the art quality has improved hugely.

Calvin & Hobbes

To continue our series I did Calvin. When I was a kid I didn't realize Hobbes was part of his imagination. But maybe that's because I thought Calvin logic was perfectly sound. It made sense to me. In fact, it still kind of does.
I always found his vocabulary amusing as well.

Footrot Flats

I figured it was about time I did a tribute to all the comics that played a part in my life growing up. A lot of them I had to go back and read later on because I really didn't understand humour when I was illiterate and 4.

Murray Ball and his footrot flat series were collected by my brother. When he wasn't looking I would borrow them and devalue them a little. If your from NZ and your reading this, and you don't know what footrot flats is  I'm extremely disappointed. Ball also did a series called Stanley the Palaeolithic Hero. I only ever saw one copy of one of the books. But it was pretty good. It's about a glasses wearing runt called Stanley trying to live in a super macho environment of cavemen, dinosaurs and clubs.

It's Lonely 30 Thousand Feet up

Digital backgrounds always have a little less soul don't they? On the other hand, I would pay someones left arm to be able to colour that consistently by hand.
I've done a decent attempt at catching up, I'm only 2 days out from being on schedule with my doodles again, and I haven't given up picture quality to do it. I have however given up the actual doing of it daily, to be able to catch up.

Flying Chair flys Away

This one is kind of a two parter.
I should use this blank bit of cyber space to tell you guys I did a quick update to the text adventure Episode 0.2 . Nothing game changing, so if you already played through and won then you don't need to bother checking it out. Lets just say the Admin gets quite a bit more talkative. Thanks Matt for backseat coding, and Harry, for thinking of a million obscure conversation topics.

Rocket Cat

The design of the cat came about when I was at a loss as to what to draw, when Steph piped up with "Cat" and then (as an afterthought) "In space."
It's true. If cats had a faster way of getting away from you, they would use it. by God they would use it. Or at least the lame cats would, the cats I would stop feeding till they showed more gratitude or left for more push over shores. Either way solving my problem. So far our family has had nice cats. Coincidence? I think not.

Freckle Face

While freckles may be cute, no one wants ones that are pre-grown on someone elses face. That's just gross. I'm not sure how I got this idea now, it was from some messed up convo at uni... I think.

Invisible Chair

We were in tutorial looking at clothing design sites (Which all tend to be in various shades of coffee), and we saw a set of images with some scarfed, skinny jeaned, circle glasses wearing dick. In the background of every picture was a clear plastic chair. And then Harry said that magic sentence.

Cleopatra's Mad Driving Skills

This didn't happen, it was a conversation I had in my head. But it would have been weird and lame if I did a comic where I talked to myself. I mean, who does that? Ha, I jest.

Locked Gate

I'm not gonna lie, this doodle is a shameless promotion of the text adventure I just created. Each episode is tiny, hence the 0.1 and 0.2. All the episodes together should tell a neat little story, and will give me both a creative release and a cognitive challenge. Seriously, making games is like playing games for me.
I probably shouldn't have 0.2 on display at the moment since the only person who's tested it so far is me. So it's really more of a draft than anything else at the moment. I wouldn't blame you for not remembering the URL, I sure don't. So I'll be putting a link to it off to the side there ->
If you can think of a decent title for the series drop a hot steaming comment somewhere for me to find.

aah, imagination, do you know no bounds? I don't imagine you do. So you don't.

Eating Pens

This doodle is based on this doodle. Not every day that happens. But I found it amusing enough to want to put my own spin on it.

Eye for an Eye

This happened. Not to me, but thats beside the point. It happened. Who says that sort of thing? He didn't take her up on that offer... Because he's better than her. And it was probably some sort of demented trust test anyway.

Stuck in the Elevator

I wonder how many more "tall" ideas I can squeeze out of this bastard before he runs dry and I chuck him in the "Used monster pile" along with the dinosaur and the axe skullies.

Jumping the Rope

Well he is jumping rope...
Yesterday I got tickets for an exclusive magic show held by Adam my nephew in the lounge. I had a choice between the full show or the short show. I chose the long show. How long could it really be anyway? So we get to the venue fashionably on time. less than a minute later the show was over and we found out it was less magic show than it was a contortionist act.
I asked him what the short show would have been like and he told me he would have only shown us one "trick".

Bye Bye (toilet)

Wouldn't it be awkward, just him looking down on you the whole time in the cubicle beside him.
Oh yes, I have indefinitely canceled the thing I do on wednesday and the thing I do on fridays. I'm sure they won't be missed.

Snow Person

Well it's Autumn and it's starting to cool down. My sister (who's acclimatized to much more tropical weather) is already putting on her warmest layers. Occasionally I put on my hoody. Unfortunatly no matter how cold it gets here in Auckland it will never snow. It will just get wet. And then cold and wet. And maybe if we're really good we'll get pelted by hail. And that's the closest we will get to snow.

At Least There's That

I'm not sure about the timing of this one.

Making Death Educational

I got Far Cry 2 the other day to get rid of the bad taste of Crysis from my mouth. FC2 was the last FPS  I remembered having fun on, finishing it far quicker than I had wished. I had previously borrowed it off a friend, but it was such a decent game I decided this time I would own it for myself.
Adam found out I had a new game and proceeded to assert his presence so he could watch. Sometimes I'm not sure whether he should be watching, as I gun down a guy from the back of a ute, and then proceed to plug the driver in the face with a couple more rounds. But I decided I would make it as an enriching experience as I could for him. So I made an example out of some idiot guard who was standing in the middle of the road, not looking both ways. The rest is history.

Dinosaur Will Get Her

Don't worry. He won't have to. She's good with her privacy settings.

I installed Crysis:Warhead last night and finished it about an hour ago. I'm not sure what to say. It had better music straight off the bat. It got into the action heaps faster. There is even less regular fighting, but at least it's spread evenly through the aliens. So I actually had something to look forward to. I bet up a guy who I was sure got toasted during the first one. But apparently not, he seemed pretty healthy and willing to screw things up every time it might look I might (God forbid) have an upper hand.
Adam my nephew decided to go co-pilot beside me. Asking a million questions and closing his eyes whenever I came across piles of dead bodies. He decided at the end he would probably be better (and enjoy) RTS's more, which brought a slightly fuzzy feeling over me.

Once again he brought up questions that made me realize there are heaps of things in games I just take for granted, he also made me slightly racist. "Who are the bad guys?" "North Koreans." "How do they know your the good guy?" "I look different." "How do you know who to shoot?" "They shoot me, and they look different." "How do they look different?" "..." "Why do they speak english?" "Because I want to know what they're saying, I can change the language." "THEY SHOULD BE ABLE TO SPEAK THEIR MOTHER TOUNGUE AND DIE WITH HONOUR YOU COLONIALIST SCUM."

We're Both Scared

Maybe its because you fall in love with the idea of someone sometimes, rather than the person themselves. Maybe it can happen to both people at the same time, and when they finally get the nerve to go out it all goes horribly. Conversations feel contrived and hardly get past the "So whats your favourite movie" stages.
Man it seems to be all about talking. And if you don't have fun talking to each other then why bother trying to force it to work?
This post is for all those ill fated dates that never worked out... I hope the little blobby couple will be ok. They'l be ok. Their world is one big massive safe neighbourhood. (Except for Dinosaurs of course. No amount of neighborhood watching will stop shit like that.)

Ok, Lets cut the chase and get to the meat and bones of what I'm after. Advertising trends in a changing time. I don't need to explain this I think. It's fairly straightforward. But I would propose that the vast majority (Aka everyone who's getting on with their life instead of doing media) hasn't noticed (or just taken for granted) the ways advertising is done now. We all know it's getting everywhere. Advertising is the bane of our existence (And as such I don't allow google ads anywhere near this blog). At the moment advertisers are piling onto the facebook/twitter bandwagon. I'm not sure why I would want to be "friends" with Coke, but I'm sure there is some sort of benefit to be had. Twitter has opened up a public avenue for conversation between the consumer and the advertiser. That is of course, if there is someone around on the advertisers behalf to talk to haters... Advertisers are making these shifts to constantly be in your eyeballs, on your level (Like a buddy) and on your mind when your no where near them.

They have realized that while google ads are all well and good, people have built filters in their heads to ignore them. We see them as ugly bits of static on the screen. So they change their tactics a little and all of a sudden they have the spotlight again (Plus prime real estate on someones blog about this subject.) For Example:

When I was a Teen

Carries on from the last post. This would really suck if I was drawing these one day at a time.
This digitally touched up version looks a lot better than the one in my book (Which has only two pages left actually.) The original drawing has a big ass black line going through the middle of his head. Thank goodness for Photoflop.

Catching Girl

I was listening to 1996 off the new Wombats album when I drew this. Go figure.

I Have a Crysis

Crysis was a great game. Until the aliens came along and ruined it. For the most part the game had huge maps to run around and navigate as you pleased, it feels very "Next Gen"y. Then when the aliens pop into the story it turns into Prey, which is a cheap rip off rail shooter of Doom 3 which was a very nice rail shooter based on an ancient game.
What I'm trying to stress here is, Crysis was like a flight simulator where at the begining you can fly all over the planet doing whatever you liked. until the last third of the game, where all they let you do was taxi around on the run way and not actually let you take off.
I also thought the design of the boss at the end was dumb to. I was unimpressed.

To offset my negativity I would like to promote this, Kris and Scott's Scott and Kris Show. Their looking for funding to make a ten episode series for Penny Arcade TV. Last night when I found it they had 900/50,000. Their currently at 20,883/50,000 which is pretty exciting. If I had an easy way to funnel money into my Pay Pal I would totally give a bit to this noble cause.

Tentacle Mouth

Neither of us enjoyed that one.
To this very day my mouth still tastes a bit like that.

Oh Sprite

It was dispiriting when the one thing I really felt like was the one thing that made me throw up through the entire ordeal. Although it was with the help of one of those swallow panadol things. Man, they don't make those things easy for me. Each one was like dancing with the gag fairy.
Thanks gorgeous for being my personal make a wish foundation and getting me a big ass sprite even though I asked for just a can, because it's only just starting to run out and I'm getting a little upset.
Don't even like sprite most of the time.

Album of the week

The Wombats Proudly Present... This Modern Glitch

This has been one of those albums I have been looking forward to since last year. Nearing the end of each year I usually go "Wow, there have been so many albums by bands I like, that means next year there won't be ANYTHING coming out." So I panic and go and look up any band I think is notable. Fortunately The Wombats were there to make sure 2011 wouldn't turn into a dismal musical desert.

It took a bit longer than usual for the album to be released, the release date jumped once or twice. But it was worth it.

If your having trouble remembering who these guys are you might remember "Lets Dance The Joy Division" a few years ago. And I saw their "Tokyo (Vampires & Wolves)" song on TV a few months ago.

Anyway If you liked them the first time round then you'l probably like them again (Even if they sound a little more polished).

I'm feeling ILL

She (my GP) asked me the same thing again via the phone when she was coming back with my blood test results to tell me I DEFINITELY had glandular fever. I'm not entirely sure I ingratiated her with an answer opting to instead just to laugh down the phone.

Haven't been

It was a rather worrying thought.
Well I have gotten to a point where I can wander around, and stare at things without my eyes hurting to much, or my body giving out from the exhaustion of the looking. So I'm going to be working at double time to get back to schedule.

It turns out sick people have a particularly well rounded approach to theories regarding eras. It goes along the line of not caring. That line ends when it leads to the big comfy sofa in front of the tv.

Mortality (It's all around Us)

EDIT: The image was added at a much later date. But drawn around the time. I've been gone from posting for about two weeks now due to glandular fever. I tried doing a drawing, but I got as far as two 'n' shapes, then got tired and had to lie down.

There is no doodle today. I was surprised I even made it to uni. Moving my body at all gave me huge splitting headaches. My eyeballs also decided that they would hurt whenever I swiveled them around. But I had to go to uni to drop off my illustration work for marking. Dear sweet Becky forced me to see the onsite doctor where I had my earhole intruded upon and my pants taken off. Not at the same time fortunately. The doctor was looking for rashes. She said I "most likely have a viral infection, flaring up my lymph glands in my neck or Meningitis... BUT PROBABLY just an infection... Or something that will kill you. Just if you start getting a rash its because your blood is scabbing over inside your veins and you won't last long."
Later on Phil, one of our primo lecturers was wondering if I was ok. When I told him about it he recounted a story about one of his employees who went home with a cough once and then never came back. They found her curled up beside her bed dead, her friends weren't around because they were at dinner or something. She was only 21. So thanks for those reassuring words bro.
Oh yes! And a wee while later two of the girls burst in freaking out about a cyclone that they had almost been in the middle of. We laughed. Cyclones don't happen in New Zealand. Well it turns out (as everyone now knows) that one had occured just down the road from us in Albany Mall, and we had no idea it was happening. The girls had watched from Gordon Harris as cars and bits of roof were picked up and dropped everywhere.
So yes, this day felt kind of apocalyptic to me, and will probably be the best excuse for not doing a doodle Ill have all year. (I'll probably post two tomorrow anyway.)

Anyway, I was using everything I just wrote to bring me around to March 2008 to a story I felt was to sensitive at the time, and I could have done no justice for.


It was around that green dot, Hastings, Hawke Bay. I had somehow been roped into hanging out with a bunch of people who were far to confident for their own good. I had only gone because the girl I liked at the time was there. Unfortunatly I was being outclassed by the aforementioned confident, sun bleach haired guys. Plans were made, plans were changed. Either way we ended up outside in the cool of the night, making our way to the beach. One of the other girls, a small little blonde thing (a little overweight with a rosey smile,) picked her way across the rocks to the sand. She was laughing as she picked her way, ever so slowly across the rocks. I watched, bemused at her speed, priding myself on my ability to cover harsh terrain like a goat.
I sat next to the girl I was interested in. She got up and sat with the cool kids, laughing together about how friggin awesome they were. I lay on my back with my hands jammed in my pockets, staring up at the stars. I watched as the group split itself into two distinctive halves. The obvious tight nit group and the flotsam and jetsam. The drifters who hadn't realized they could be their own group yet.
Eventually the cool kids dictated that we shall now wander round the deserted street-lamp lit roads.
The blonde thing came across the rocks again. having as much trouble as last time. I offered her my arm as something to hold on to as she fought her way over them. She smiled and took it, still flailing all over the place, but at least it made me feel a little less useless. We struck up a conversation and she told me about her life. It contained the hospital a lot. Quite a lot. She seemed to live there. She made friends there who she watched pass away. I'm unsure now of what exactly she had. But the bottom line was, she was extremely fragile. Any day she could pass away. Her doctors had her always trying out new assortments of drugs to try and reverse her condition, or slow it. Some had made her anorexic, while a new set was given to undo that one and given her "A bit to much weight." she blushed as she told me. The girl I was interested in brushed passed me "You guys seem to be having fun." she said, with a hint of malice. This confused me a little. She had gone from an evening of ignoring me to jealousy in moments. I didn't really care at that moment though, I asked the little blonde thing if she was scared or worried or anything. She smiled at me and told me no. "I just live one day at a time. There's no point in being sad or worried about it." I was blown away by her happiness. She had been given such a shit deal in life but she never once complained about it. She seemed like the happiest person I had ever met.
Way before I was ready for that night to end we all piled into a tiny car and drove home. We were all crammed in the back and I tried not to crush the little blonde. I drew on the fogged window absentmindedly and she talked about how she had always wanted to draw.
We got to my stop, the first, and I jumped out. Before closing the door I looked at her "Uhm.. I guess I'll see you round." "..Yeah." I slammed the door and started trudging back to my outside room. I stopped. "SHIT! I should have got her number."
I told Peaky & Zac about her. "You should have got her number man."
I swore at them.
And thats the story about someone I deeply respect, but neither know the name of or know whether they are even still on this planet. Sometimes when shits getting real I just remember that there was once this fragile little girl, who was twice the man any of us could possibly be.

She Left You

Sadly, thats mostly the case... I was told that I shouldn't be doing my final work on printing paper. Which is a good point due to it's wrinkliness after being water coloured (and hence, weird wave shaped shadows when I scan it). Unfortunatly that means I'm gonna have to redraw everything. Groan face. If there is one thing I detest its covering old territory again. Oh well. At least I didn't get to far.

OD - Queen St

K Rd sidestreet

Wrinkly Vs. Supply

Let me just note that this was in reference to someones atrocious driving. Everyone's an asshole, some are just worse than others. It's also one of the most hilarious things I have ever heard. Unfortunatly only the worst quotes stick in my head.

NZ Music month is also here, and I have to say, my line up of NZ music has certainly impressed me more so far this year than it ever has before. If your sick and tired of the folky junk I keep pushing here you can see if Harry can liven up your tastes a little.