Maybe I’m doing it wrong.

Consumerist posted this beautifully animated short visualizing the credit crisis.

Incidentally, I sure hope I don’t find out how insanely popular this video game reviewer is.

Emergency 411: Going Green (Corporate Edition)

Requiem for a Green Monster

It was 2001 when my friend Nick and I wrote our first (and only) cartoon about the sardonic, ever-suffering super hero The Sarcastic Hulk. And over the last two years I had been living that cartoon. I’m so damned observant I only needed my friend Lisa to point it out. You tell me if there are any similarities between a certain mild-mannered workaday tool and the jaded giant:

• Pushover Bruce Banner gets laid off at his dead-end job.
• Bruce dates a hippie. Their relationship consists mostly of arguing and making out.
• Mounting failures and everyday frustrations make SH bitter and also kind of a dick.

And most of all…

• Our hero is sarcastic.

Talk about life imitating art! If only someone had kept writing these I may have had some warning. Oh wait. But what gets me is I didn’t see this situation coming and I wrote it.*

*I will catch endless hell from one Nick Shaheen if I don’t mention that he also wrote the script, and that I’m an ass for taking out all his best jokes. Nick, nobody was going to get a joke about Meredith Baxter-Berney.

Slowboat to Hades & Super Mario Galaxy

The navigation for the Gorillaz DVD Slowboat to Hades puts you, the viewer, inside the Gorillaz world as an ersatz crime scene investigator / tomb raider, skulking through the not-quite-abandoned Kong Studios and all its leaking, shorting, smoldering disrepair. Navigation can be either an immersive or a tedious experience (depending on your point of view) as you move from room to dimly-lit room, shining your flashlight over whatever strewn detritus it is that will unlock the next featurette.

Jamie Hewlett’s design and animation support the themes established in the Demon Days album which this DVD is derived from. The premise, shown in broken 52″ flatscreen TVs hung askew on puched-in, graffitied walls, and studio recording equipment connected through a dizzying rat’s nest of patched, mismatched cables, states that all the money and success you enjoy will not stop the world from falling apart, and all those creature comforts will too succumb to systemic decay.

It was while immersing myself in this (fantasy… I hope) world that I noticed it had something in common with a few other games I enjoy: Super Mario Galaxy, Mario 64 and Myst.

Each environment is an island unto itself (sometimes more or less literally so). Each game establishes a series of very detailed worlds, each with its own flora and fauna, themes and internal logic. Each is a puzzle; constrained but with enough room to allow the visitor to move freely, to explore and interact with this unique, peculiar environment. It’s comforting to know that the experience is bounded, but not limited — there can still be a great deal of variation inside its isolated shores, and maybe finding out what those limits are is part of the fun.

And is it a coincidence that they all involve islands?

This reminds me of when I asked an artist friend to paint me a picture of “an enclosed space”, not really knowing myself what it meant (neither did she, which is probably why my fine art collection is floundering).

Whether it’s Noodle’s flying windmill island, the Stoneship Age, or Mario making his way across the Gusty Garden galaxy, I find something captivating (no pun intended) about each game’s world.

Puma Man & Dan Danger T-Shirts!

Some time ago, I had the brainstorm of making a T-shirt featuring the Puma Man of MST3K fame. I’m proud to say it was received with great enthusiasm! And zero sales. Big surprise. In fact, the only feedback was when a friend posted a link on A Special Thing and got back, “Neat shirt, too bad it’s on CafePress.” Yikes, I guess my one sale’s dog got run over by Baron Von Cafepress when he was a kid. But looking back at the shirts, I did have one legitimate design gripe:

I needed to make the logo bigger.

Enter Printfection. Though it has the look and feel of a beta of Windows Explorer, Printfection handles the nuts and bolts of creating merchandise better than CafePress: lower prices, multiple pricing levels for items, better image management tools, the ability to sell multiple designs for each clothing item. And yes, you can make the logo bigger (up to 4.67″ high)! All Printfection needs to do is fix their clunky and occasionally unclear interface.

But the most important question is: how do the shirts look? I took a chance on Printfection’s $2 t-shirt offer and printed up a quick Puma Man shirt for myself. Printfection doesn’t seem to handle solid, non-web-safe colors especially well, which resulted in a shade of yellow something like the one here. But switching to the similar #FFCC00 for the color of the text seemed to fix that problem.

The PUMA MAN tee is perfect for wearing to the gym, as if to say to the world, “I’m out of shape and a huge nerd!”

And there’s a shirt depicting the cold-war kid’s drawing Dan Danger, available in special commie red:

Bigger logos, smaller prices. These as well as womens’ styles and other apparel are available all at a reduced price at my Printfection store!

Emergency 411: Having a Baby

I’m back with another installment of Emergency 411 — the answer guide with all the answers. In this episode, experience the joy and potential financial windfall that comes with having a baby.

Don’t let the fact that I’ve never fathered a baby have any bearing on my credentials in this matter. By now you should already know not to take my advice.

The Warning Label Generator

Fitting with my Emergency 411 series, there’s a warning label generator website just for making your own official-looking warning labels. I mean, who hasn’t needed this:

The Goons over at Something Awful have already put it to good(?) use, so check out their labels here, before they get reposted on Ebaum’s World or something.

See my Animation Showing in LA

I’m feeling particularly embiggened this week.

(In addition to my winnings in Vegas this weekend) I learned this Sunday that one of my Emergency 411 cartoons was selected to be in The Animation Show! So of course I’ll be there to see my tiny, tiny video on the big, big screen. I had already caught the show last year at the Nuart theater in Santa Monica and can’t wait to see what’s been added since, as well as see who the other mobifest winners are. You can still see all the videos submissions over at mobifest.net where my Skydiving video — much to my amazement — graces the front page.

If you’d like to go, The Animation Show is this Tuesday at Laemmle’s Music Hall 3, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Tuesday, April 3, 2007 at 7:30 PM.

On top of all this, my site got a mention on the Animation Show journal, in particular a cartoon Nick and I did on that jaded green giant, the Sarcastic Hulk. Check out the awesome quote:

…you’ve got to spend some time over at his site timtoon.com. In particular his “Sarcastic Hulk” is one of the funnier tv funhouse style revamps i’ve seen in a long time

All it takes is a little positive feedback to get me movin’ again. Now I can’t wait to start on another SH clip. One that has the Sarcastic Hulk, y’know, actually in it.

I’m at a Shitty Concert!

I am pleased to introduce a third installment of Emergency 411, the answer guide with all the answers. Today we have a handy tutorial on how to turn a bad concert into a “rockin’” one.

By now you must be asking yourself, “Gee, where does he get his ideas?” Well, that’s just gonna have to be my little secret.

Catch the first two Emergency 411 episodes after the bump.

Read more

Sarcastic Hulk is very, very clever

I tell ya, Green Man’s Burden.

You work your ass off at the high-energy physics lab, trying to buy the good life for your mouthy, hippie girlfriend, only she doesn’t respect you, she’s too busy “rebelling” against her military brass father. Maybe he didn’t hug her enough as a kid, so now she’s taking it out on him by protesting his corrupt military-industrial corporation. The very military contractor you work for. And to top it all off, on the one day you get bombarded with a lethal dose of gamma radiation, you find out your company just cut your healthcare.

It just makes you so… so… snide.

See what happens when a guy who couldn’t take it anymore… takes it A LITTLE MORE!

Read more