Figured I’d post something I drew since I barely seem to do that here anymore. It’s Linda, a very, very bad woman from the old arcade game, Double Dragon. I drew a picture of her in practically in the same pose a few years back but that didn’t turn out so well. Too cartoony. This is more like it. It’s weird because I was thinking of drawing it over again recently because I need art of her for a few ScrollBoss projects. Out of the blue, a friend of mine e-mails me because he needed the old pic for a fan game project. I was glad that he wanted to use my art, but I felt bad because it was a bad picture. So that was sign that I need to draw her again. Plus, it’ll be good to have a pic of her that matches the quality of that Abobo pic I did last year.

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I bought that Lego set with Harley Quinn just for the minifig. Seriously. The Batman Begins-style Batman that comes with it was immediately put aside for trading fodder and the other parts are still in their bags to be sorted later on. It comes with some of those little diamonds and gems that you can put into a treasure chest and has lots of good vehicle parts. But, really, it’s all about Lego Harley Quinn.

This is one of those posts that I just point out something that I don’t feel like typing over and over again. You’ll see why once you read point number 2.

My original computer stopped working in late May. I’m currently using a used computer that a friend hooked me up with. There are a few problems that I still need to work out with this.

1.) Everything that I was working on is trapped on the hard drives of the old computer which won’t power up now. My backup CDs are pretty out of date (most seem to be Nov. 2007) and I can’t even find all the backups now. The HD enclosure I ordered from TechSunny is on the way and it will (hopefully) let me pull the stuff off the old hard drives. If I was working on something for you recently, it’s probably trapped on one of those two drives. Oddly enough, I just started making back-ups of stuff and started with things I planned to delete to make HD space for some video captures. So I have backups of useless stuff!

2.) Here’s the the current big issue: freezes. This computer freezes at random times and doesn’t start back up unless I restart the machine. It froze twice this afternoon within the span of 3 1/2 hours but sometimes I can go hours with no problems. There are times that I forgot to retype and send messages that were lost after having to restart the system. If you’re wondering why most of my responses to everything are so short, this is why. I’m trying to work this out myself before asking for help. Of course, this is slowing down any computer-based work.

I’m sorry for the delays on everything and I’ll add new posts in the NewOld Computer category to keep you updated on this.

From this day forward, I will call my current computer the New-Old computer. It’s old, but it’s new to me. Damn you for sticking that in my head, NBC. That and replacing all cartoons with ‘Saved by the Bell’ rip-offs back in the 90’s, but that’s another post. A really good friend hooked me up with this one for free, but I’ll still just keep throwing money at him as repayment. There are little parts here and there that I’ll have to keep replacing, but it’s easily more powerful than the old computer. I just got a sound card for it and the next item will be a USB Hard Drive cradle to snatch my old data off the old computer.

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While rounding up new versions of my old programs, I finally found out that Yahoo bought out Musicmatch and completely ruined it in ways that only Yahoo can do. From what I’ve read, they took the MusicMatch program, ditched any progress they’d made from version 5 to 10.0 and added DRM functions to it while calling it Yahoo Music Jukebox or something. Nice. I’ll have to find or buy something new to rip music tracks with because Yahoo is shambling Fail Zombie that infects things with every bite. Yahoo seemed to go through the change when it switched the Yahoo Clubs to Yahoo Groups and completely mangled a lot of the old clubs in the process. Sad.

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Most people that watch Family Guy saw the Season 2 episode Let’s Go To The Hop where Peter and Lois were about to get some freaky quality time together and Lois announces “The safety word is Banana.” What weirded me out today was hearing that again in a MAD-TV sketch today. It was the I Love Lucy parody where Ricky brings home The Artist Formerly Known As Prince and, well, some stereotypically Prince-like things are about to happen if you know what I’m sayin’ and I think you do. One of the last lines in the sketch is delivered by Alex Borstein playing a whip-wielding Ethel Mertz who yells, “The Safety Word is BANANAS!” It’s wrong on a level that I can’t put into words, but knowing that she said it in two different shows makes that sketch a little less disturbing. Since it’s so disturbing, I’ll try to find a video of it so you can be scarred, too.

It was my 35th birthday two days ago. I’m not a big fan of my birthday but not for the usual crying about getting a year older. Long story short, messed-up things have happened either days before or right on my birthday. Not just to me or people that I know, but people that I’ve never even heard of until after the stuff went down. I’d like to thank everyone everyone who wished me a Happy Birthday and those who were nice enough to give me gifts. I’m not enough of a jerk to demand or expect gifts, but it’s always nice to get ‘em.

It was a regular workday on the 12th so I have to celebrate tonight. I’m going to watch two films that I’ve never seen before: National Lampoon’s Movie Madness and the Shaw Brothers classic kung-fu film Come Drink With Me. Movie Madness may turn out to be bad, but the Shaw Bros. flick is said to be one of the best in the genre. I’ll probably get some video gaming in, too. There is only one meal worthy of such a night. That’s right: Pizza and Root Beer.

The new computer still locks up from time to time now, but the scanner finally works. No, not the mindblowing Michael Ironside kind of Scanner but the one that I can put artwork in and magically make it appear inside my computertron thingy. So now it’s just the freezes and sound that need fixing.

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The Boodocks season 2 DVD set is out and Newsarama’s Steve Fritz did his usual job of writing a good review of things that he knows about. He mentions in one of the commentaries mentions someone that comic fans have been bugging him about for years: Caesar. Yes, Caesar. For those who don’t know, Michael Caesar rolled into the Boondocks comic strip later into the run, hung out with Huey, and just tried to get the poor dude to lighten up a bit. They formed an unstoppable tag-team that fought injustice, tried to get Condoleezza Rice a man and hosted “the Most Embarrassing Black People of the Year Award” ceremonies. Word has it that they are waiting for the right time and voice actress to bring Caesar to life. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Brooklyn’s favorite son gets his chance to shine in animated form.

A few weeks ago, my old HP computer started freaking out and wouldn’t even make it to Safe Mode. I kept trying to fix it in DOS but it eventually stopped working at all. Someone hooked me up with another computer so I’m back on the internet. This machine blows my old one away but there are still some things that need fixing and updating.

Besides current problems with sound and my scanner, nearly everything else works. One big thing is adjusting to Windows XP after years of using Windows ME. Just about everything I installed worked nicely and I can now run stuff that wouldn’t work for W-ME. The first one that I ran to was the Lego Digital Designer and I’ll probably get that Amazon.com MP3 Album thing once I can hear things on this system. I’ll have to set up DosBox to use a lot of my favorite programs (M.U.G.E.N. tools) and emulators (Genecyst and NESticle for graphic-extracting purposes).

My sites won’t have any big updates until I get the data off the old computer. There isn’t much of a reason to update Illmosis until I can scan artwork again and there are a lot of bits on ScrollBoss that were only on my old hard drive. Plus, I want to wait until everything is stable before installing the Apache and PHP programs that let me test out all those funky PHP features. Of course, all Works-in-progress are on hold until I can pull them off the old PC. The irony is that I finally started making data backups but started with unnecessary stuff so I could delete it to make room for raw video captures. S-M-R-T.

Anyway, I apologize to anyone that I’m doing work for and I’ll try to get things back on track as soon as possible.

I spent my Saturday working on random stuff and coughing up phlegm. I hope that means that my sinus problems are on the way out. I finally got some decent sleep and this is the first time in over a week that I feel fully awake. On the plus side, I had Pizza and Root Beer, one of the most glorious food combinations on this Earth. I think I overdid it with the cheese, but that’s literally just me since I’m the only person eating it. My first attempt in six years to make my own “Blizzard” just made a Reese Cup milkshake because I put in too much milk. The fact that I need to practice the right balance of all this stuff again is just sad beyond belief.

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While checking out my weblogs for the first time in dang-near-ever, I found out that the Spriting entry on Wikipedia now has a link to my old Frankenspriting tutorial on ScrollBoss. I can’t who came up with the term Frankenspriting, but it was probably someone on Solid Soul’s late (and still missed) Inner Circle board & site. I remember Mighty Damocles having the technique mastered back when I was just a newbie and I still think she’s probably more qualified to write a tutorial than I am. Plus, looking at that old ScrollBoss page reminds me that I still have a chunk of areas that need some serious updating.

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For my own future reference, here’s a link to a page describing one of the best episodes of Reading Rainbow ever: the one with the steel drum band.
Reading Rainbow #415: My Little Island
I used to think I was the only person who loved that episode as a young’un, but someone else always remembers it when I bring it up somewhere. Now that I have the episode number, I can look around and see if it’s on DVD. It’s too bad that Reading Rainbow went out of production now that the kid’s book market is said to be doing better than it has in quite a few years.

First of all, here’s that Harley Quinn in color. Ain’t she cute? People still seem to like it now that it’s in color so I guess I didn’t screw it up. Some like the shine effects on the fabric, but I tried to avoid making it look like she’s wearing a catsuit made of Heinz ketchup and an oil slick. Clicking this link will let you see Harley with the alternate face that I mentioned before. I was seriously thinking of Stimpy the cat when I drew that face but decided to draw her with the face that’s in the main picture but a Google Image Search for more costume reference turned up a DCAU Batman cover with her making that same cartoony face. Correction: whoever drew that cover did it right and I botched it. All of it was still fun to do.

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If you felt a disturbance in the universe on Friday night, that’s my fault. For the first time ever, I managed to find a Ground-Zero Entertainment kung-fu flick on DVD that didn’t crash during the movie or Wu-Tang video, show that it was made from a heavily-wrinkled video tape, have their VHS tape player’s menu screen pop up in the middle of the movie or just burst into flame for no good reason. I’m still shocked that I was able to watch everything on it. The movie, Return of the Deadly Blade starring Yasuaki Kurata & David Chiang, was an okay flick for the $3 that I paid Big Lots for it. Not great, but not horrible. The bonus music video was for “Chessboxing” and is worth at least $1 by itself. There’s a lot of other short bits like trailers, actor bios and a video of Poppa Wu droppin’ knowledge while playing chess. I think I’ll go back to giving Ground-Zero more of a chance after this one.

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The main cleaning account that I’m working now has an actual break in it. Due to that, I started bringing a small notebook and pencil with me to catch any mental droppings that roll off my brain. I seem to get a lot more ideas and my creative flow is stronger than it was when I was doing two break-less accounts. Back then, I’d have dozens of stray ideas a week but could only remember a few by the time I got back home. Now I’m sketching out all kinds of random stuff including character redesigns, poses and even lettering pixel widths for future mini-logos. I feel some sort of mental momentum happening. With any luck, that’ll lead speeding up my drawing time and getting more work done.

Just a heads-up for any poor soul out there that’s bored enough to read this blog:

Free Comic Book Day is tomorrow.

Hit up your local comic shop to get free comics. If it’s a good store and the people working in it treat you like you’re worth a damn, buy some books to reward their good people skills. Good comic shops need all the help they can get!