So for the past week there’s been a voice in the back of my head saying “Go buy an Xbox 360 and play some games”. I ignored it when it first popped up, but it kept on returning. Yesterday, I finally gave in to Microsoft’s orbital mind control lasers and got one, along with a couple of used games.

The game I’ve mostly been playing is Saint’s Row 3. I’d heard good things about it, and so far I think it’s one of the most entertaining sandbox games I’ve ever played for a bunch of reasons: very flexible character customization, the ability to customize vehicles and summon new instances of them whenever you like (I’m currently playing as a white-skinned lady with blue hair, who mostly drives around town on a blue crotch rocket with nitrous – bet you can’t guess who that’s inspired by), and its general insanity. It’s really a TOYBOX instead of a serious, gritty interactive entertainment.

And it just did something I found very interesting. A voice started coming on the radio with a guy theorizing that he’s maybe a character in a video game, and then ranting at the player to get up off their ass and go do something besides sitting on the couch, pushing buttons and getting fatter. This bit came up a couple of times as I failed to get off my ass and stop playing with my virtual toy cars, and then another bit came up, with a guy telling me that I’m just doing what the game tells me to do. Shoot that guy! Drive faster! Run into that thing! Come on! Do it! And the game laying itself bare like that made me laugh, and turn the console off.

I don’t know if this sequence of radio speeches is deliberately programmed or not. They didn’t come up when I was playing it for a while last night. If it is, that’s a very interesting thing to do. Detect that the player’s been playing the game for what feels like Too Damn Long, and start poking them about it. I’d like to see more games do that, to be honest. One could also possibly do tricks like ramping up the difficulty, though that might just make some people double down on their obsessive effort to Conquer This Mission, Damnit.

I was waiting in line in Trader Joe’s with a basket full of stuff. There was a kid sitting in the shopping cart of the woman in front of me. He looked me over, then looked up at his mother. “Mommy, is she a witch?” he asked, pointing at me.

“Shhh,” his mother said, looking back over her shoulder.

I grinned, and bounced a little. “Yes! I am.”

More kids need to live in worlds where they meet perky red-haired witches at the grocery store, I think.

(It wasn’t even a Witch Hat Day. I was just wearing a big fuzzy coat and my black hat with a red ribbon on it.)

8:30. Gabe IMs me asking if I’m interested in contributing to a TMBG tribute minicomic.
9:30. I actually look at my IMs, say yes, and find out the details. I pick a track: “Sapphire Bullets”.
10:00. I make a new document in Illustrator and put the song on repeat. After a while I switch to some Barry Adamson because look I can only listen to a one-and-a-half-minute song so many times, and Adamson’s noir jazz suits where the story went.
11:00. I IM Gabe back with a synopsis of the story I’ve got roughed out. It’s 13 pages long, and each page basically covers the same amount of the song – it’s a comic book music video!

I’ll draw it sometime later; the deadline’s late next year, and I have a lot of other things I’d like to get out of the way first. Like my piece for MY anthology for instance…

8:30. Gabe IMs me asking if I’m interested in contributing to a TMBG tribute minicomic.
9:30. I actually look at my IMs, say yes, and find out the details. I pick a track: “Sapphire Bullets”.
10:00. I make a new document in Illustrator and put the song on repeat. After a while I switch to some Barry Adamson because look I can only listen to a one-and-a-half-minute song so many times, and Adamson’s noir jazz suits where the story went.
11:00. I IM Gabe back with a synopsis of the story I’ve got roughed out. It’s 13 pages long, and each page basically covers the same amount of the song – it’s a comic book music video! With romance, spies, betrayal, and no dialogue.

I’ll draw it sometime later; the deadline’s late next year, and I have a lot of other things I’d like to get out of the way first. Like my piece for MY anthology for instance…

So today I decided to go out of the house and have something like a weekend. I put a few Rita books on consignment at Zanadu (awesome comic shop that I would totally be going to more regularly if I was downtown), then went to see “Hotel Transylvania”.

This was really on a total whim. I’d seen a brief piece about it that mentioned that Genndy Tartakovsky was the director, and that he’d been really pushing the animators to replicate wild, cartoony distortions in 3D. I didn’t bother with reviews; I’d seen a preview of it a while back and said “huh, that looks like it might be fun”, and went on that.

And I am REALLY GLAD I DID, because it was a feast for the eyes. Everything moved like a lovingly drawn cartoon character instead of something realistic. The shapes in the designs were fun to look at, and my animator’s eyes picked up what looked like some REALLY INTERESTING single frames here and there. This was truly a 3d-rendered cartoon feature.

The story? Nothing astounding. But it didn’t ever make me feel stupid. There’s some nice reversals of cliché here and there. The climax has a few bits that felt a little off, and the song at the very end goes on about 30 seconds too long. But that is my sole critique of the film. Oh, and I really could’ve done without the fart joke in one of Frankenstein’s early scenes.

This film made me want to learn how 3D animation is done now. And that’s a damn hard thing to do to a 2D addict like myself. Kudos to Genndy and the Dreamworks crew.

Strongly recommended.

“I know,” I said. “I’ll just catch up on Homestuck while I have my lunch, then get back to drawing.”

THREE HOURS LATER…

A little lifehack that popped up on Hacker News yesterday: Knock off work at 5pm. Period. The idea is that every time you’re tempted to slack off, you’ll remember that you CAN’T MAKE IT UP IN THE EVENING, and save the slack for later.

It worked pretty well for my first try; I was able to keep myself focused and take the latest page of Rita from one panel and roughs to completely done – and that’s including a super-complicated background in one panel. Which you can bet I’ll be reusing. We’ll see if it continues to work…

It probably helped that I saw a retweet about someone saying that “BE ATTITUDE FOR GAINS” was going to be their new motto for doing comics. So I found myself some screenshots of the boss encounters from Radiant Silvergun, made one my backdrop, and put on the soundtrack to R-Type. (And snagged the Radiant Silvergun soundtrack later on when that was done.) It did pretty good at reminding me to STAY ON TASK.

(I also dyed my hair. Back to red – having Twilight Sparkle’s hair was fun for a while, but red’s going to help fight the winter blahs much better!)