Saturday, April 12, 2008

Sneakers 1992-2008


A sad time for me and for all who cared for her. Considering the disease she had, we did the best we could and gave her the lifetime of a normal kitty instead of it having it get cut in half. For that I'm grateful. She certainly deserved more, at least I tend to think that due to our two previous cats having lived to be 20. I guess we've been a bit spoiled and I know I was kinda hoping we could beat the odds, but she just got more and more sick over the last few months.

I know that at times like this, it can sound cliched to say how sweet and lovable she was, but she truly seemed to have heavy duty traces of the cute gene. Hopefully this comes out in the slideshow. I only wish I could've said good-bye to her in person, but was unable to for reasons cited below.

Wish I could say that this latest round of postlessness was just due to losing my assigned kitty or to my usual procrastination, but this time it's more along the lines of the crappiest month of March I can remember having. At about the same time Sneakers was entering the final stages of the feline CRF she'd had for about 9 years, I had to go under the knife. Seems I had a little (i.e. painful) problem with my gall bladder and had to get it removed. A serious condition in itself, which ended up being complicated by the fact they had a hard time FINDING the damn thing.

See, many ages ago when I was but 4 days old, my pancreas had grown around my intestine, causing a blockage. The doctors had to conduct bypass surgery to correct it. No problem, except that now when they went down my throat, they couldn't find the duct or whatever where the gall bladder empties into my GI tract. This apparently was due to the bypass surgery altering my anatomy somewhat; they had to take an extra day or two to conduct an MRI and also to contact the hospital I was born in in an (vain) attempt to track down any records from the surgery I had three freaking decades ago. Meanwhile, all the bile that was building up in my system was giving me jaundice, turning my skin and eyes to a similar shade o' yellow as Yellow Bastard from Sin City.

Finally they wheel me into surgery, but not before I managed to cut up my face in a foolish attempt to shave using the cheap POS razors they had at the hospital. This resulted in me having 3 Band-Aids stuck around my mouth and neck, so must've looked like hell going into ER. Right before I went under, the doctor said that they couldn't remove it via the modern method,which seems to involve three small incisions, due to my prior surgery and that they'd have to do it old school, which involved open surgery and a larger scar. Fortunately, I'm happy to report the surgeons did a wonderful job and everything went more or less smoothly. He said afterwards that he had to take some time cutting through old scar tissue to get the thing out, but other than that, it was all good.

As of now, I'm pretty much recovered. The doctor says that no change in my diet is needed, except that my body will be slightly less efficient at breaking down fats, so I should have less of them, which is what I've been doing anyway.

Oh, and did I mention that I had my birthday in the middle of all that? Nothing makes you feel older on or near your birthday than going into surgery to get something removed. That and being stuck in a hospital alone with all your immediate family being 500 miles away, with the thought that something could go wrong and not being able to see them again beating around your head. I've never been comfortable being so far from home and these experiences just seem to underline that feeling in a big way.

Good news is that Dad flew down and managed to pick me up from the hospital. We hung out in the hotel and watched as much crappy TV as I had in the hospital, except that the Day's Inn had no AMC channel, which was the one lone beacon of slightly decent programing amidst a vast sea of unending crapola. Nevertheless, we made the most of it. We even managed to drive out to Annapolis and go over the Chesapeake Bay bridge, which is supposed to be five mile long. Then we saw the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, which had more to do with fishing than with any major maritime history. Dad saw most of it while I was too tired to do much walking and just hung out in the fornt office. Still it was good just to get out of that hotel room.

I've gone on a bit with this, and I don't want to bore the handful of readers I may or may not have, so I'll cut this short (guess it's too late for that though...:P) . There's more, but I'll save that for yet another angst-ridden rant somewhere down the line. If you gotten to this point, thanks for sticking around.
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Monday, February 25, 2008

Glorious, Life Like-ish Color...


And yes, that's the logo for The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Be Touched by his Noodley Appendage...

Got a chance with this drawing to play around with Flash as an illustration platform. It works well most of the time, but there's still an issue with lines that you hope are being drawen smooth and thin being interpreted as big fat blotches. Methinks that the software wasn't design to keep up with how fast a user is used to drawing using a sketchbook. Between that that the not too infrequent crashes, there's a few kinks left to iron out. That being said, I still feel way more loose and comfortable drawing-wise in Flash than if I tried it in Illustrator. Eww...

Got another Kate in the works. Might be a bit too ambitious because there's some effects I'm having to learn how to pull off, but I'm feeling more confident lately about challenging myself. If it turns out, it may end up as an alternative desktop. We shall see...
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Wednesday, February 13, 2008

The Wrath of Kate


Two posts in one month?! Whoa! *dodges snowballs tossed by Satan, made possible due an abundance of snow in his unholy neck of the woods*

Been awhile since I posted actual art up here, so now I got my yearly quota out of the way. :P This sketch features the return of Kate, who was last seen in an earlier post and is a character in an RPG thread I occasionally post in. Not to put words in her mouth or to dictate to the audience what she's actually saying, but she's obviously a little peeved...

"Why yes, I'm well aware that some of the other girls are a bit jealous of me. It's NOT what I had in mind this year..."

Maybe I'll explain further at some future point. On the drawing side of it, I got to play with the Cintiq on this one. Flash and Cintiq seem to go real well together for me. There are a few annoyances, but nothing to make me turn to Illustrator *shudders*. Also, I've been practicing on drawing hands lately and I'm just starting to feel a teeny bit more comfortable with getting all the fingers into an expressive, natural position. Still need reference to pull them off, probably always will.
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Tuesday, February 5, 2008

The Changing of the Reel

Though it pains me to do so, the time has at last come to retire my college era demo reel. Yay, though it hath served me well (eventually landing me my first professional animation gig), alas time has only made me see how much I didn't know back then. The guy in the orange Barney suit just moves all over the place instead of gesturing with anything resembling intelligible intent (though I guess it works for that particular character :P) The little puppet bit near the end of Dementia is still one of my favorite moments. The rest is either non-character work or stuff I could never get rendered, due to end-of-semester deadlines and (at the time) skill level restrictions.

But fear not! A new reel consisting of actual 'professionally made' material has been procured for your amusement.



This is but an early draft consisting of the best clips I currently have handy. As new stuff becomes available, I'll be tossing it in with the rest.

This will also serve as the vanguard for the newly redesigned piercedbrains.com site, which is also in desperate need of a make-over. Been training myself in Flash secretly, at night. (crap, shouldn't have posted that, ahh well...)

Won't be making anything too Flash-y (groan), but it'll hopefully be enough to allow me some control over the design of the key elements. I know I could go the easy route and just throw in some Google/Flickr plug-ins, but I guess I have a thing about sending the link to my supposedly professional site to a potential employer and having it just be a link to a Flickr page or be it's own page but have 'powered by Google' watermarks all over everything. Just call me Mr. Control Freak...
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Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Testing out a photstream plug-in

What?

He's got a what? A giant yellow robot head?

Ya know, I never noticed that...

Huh...
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Monday, January 7, 2008

Ahh, survived 2007...whew!

And what better to ring in the New Year than with a little ditty by Mr. Leonard Nimoy and Friends!

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Friday, December 7, 2007

KoT Lite

Rumors of my death have only been slightly exaggerated...

These are the two of the latest filler strips I drew for the crew over at Divine Folklore, home of Knights of Time. Written by resident Genius of Insanity Sora, rendered in a style of either a parody or shameless rip-off of Applegeeks Lite and featuring the latest epic battles between Mac and PC. A fine pair, if I do say so myself...
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