Lost & Found: Nerdy Drawings I Made in Middle School

I was going through a box of junk in my closet ear­lier tonight in search of some­thing com­pletely unre­lated (Chi­nese ther­apy balls–don’t ask) when I dis­cov­ered a thick stack of draw­ings that I appar­ently did in mid­dle school, because they’re dated circa 1993 — 1994.  I would have been in 7th and 8th grade.

Check out the hand­i­work on my cross-eyed Chun Li:

Pure skill.

The funny thing is, I’m not sure I could draw any bet­ter if I tried today. With the excep­tion of a poster-size George Har­ri­son por­trait I once drew for my boyfriend in in the early ‘00s, I haven’t put pen­cil to paper since high school art class, where pretty much all I did was dick around and take stealth naps.

Any­way, here’s the rest of the draw­ings I found:

Look­ing at these draw­ings at age 30 is like open­ing a time cap­sule of my past nerdy inter­ests: X-Men, Sega games, Ani­ma­ni­acs , Dis­ney, Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles… Oh wait, I still like all that stuff.  But it’s funny to exam­ine them through the lens of my twelve year old self.  For exam­ple, I must have thought Psy­locke was one of the coolest X-Men because I drew her three times.  I must have also been really obsessed with the Sega CD game  Vay at the time.

Nowa­days most of my art is done on a com­puter screen, but there was a time when I would spend hours on end sight-drawing ran­dom sub­jects from what­ever nerd para­pher­na­lia  I had lay­ing around–game man­u­als, comic books, trad­ing cards, Sega Visions magazine…

I would put on music (prob­a­bly Ace of Base, lol) and just go to town until my hands went numb and eraser shav­ings cov­ered my lap. I remem­ber insist­ing my mom buy me those nice black Pilot ink pens which I used to painstak­ingly trace over my pen­cil lines.  Also: I’m not very skilled at col­or­ing with markers.

Some­times I think about get­ting back into the habit of draw­ing regularly–I have sev­eral half-ass sketch­books that were started with the best intentions–but the prob­lem is that I tend to think of a zil­lion other more pro­duc­tive things I could be doing with my time and the nov­elty wears off right quick.

Maybe I should just start draw­ing Ninja Tur­tles every day.

‘Play Games’ Page Updated (Finally)

My poor Play Games page has been neglected for an awfully long time.

I had high ambi­tions for it when I first put it up, but to be hon­est, I just kind of for­got about it.  So for the past year or so it’s only had two games on it. Sorry about that.

Today I finally got around to fix­ing things up over there.  I added a ton of free games to my col­lec­tion and spruced up the lay­out a bit with a fun vin­tage tele­vi­sion set theme.  Basi­cally it’s no longer the big pile of suck that it once was.  I’ll also con­tinue to add more games as I go along, because I’m sure I’ve over­looked stuff.

Here’s a sam­pling of what’s in the collection:

• Free­ware browser & HTML5 games
• Old school adven­ture games
• Pure text adventures
• Retro­cade games
• Vir­tual 80’s toys
• Inter­ac­tive books
• And other fun stuff & things!

Now you have no excuses to be pro­duc­tive, doing what­ever it is that pro­duc­tive peo­ple do. Head on over to my free games page and have some fun!

I’m on Pinterest Now…Doing Pinteresty Things!

Today I finally joined all the cool kids on the visual crack site known as  Pin­ter­est (thanks to my awe­some co-worker for the invite!) and I’m begin­ning to under­stand why they say it’s addicting.

 There are just so many cool peo­ple over there post­ing pic­tures of amazing/beautiful/interesting things. I just—can’t—stop—looking—at stuff—and things—OMG!  Is there some kind of ther­apy for this?

I’ve only been a mem­ber for a few hours and I’ve already cre­ated eight boards! EIGHT!  I’m plan­ning to use Pin­ter­est as yet another cura­tion tool to dis­cover and share new things, track my inter­ests, and help feed my blog and Twitter.

Some­how Pin­ter­est (the fastest-growing social net­work which now nearly  equals Twit­ter and Google in terms of dri­ving refer­ral traf­fic, by the way), cre­ated the secret sauce for suc­cess, which seems to taste some­thing like this:

1. “Pin­ning” some­thing doesn’t require much effort.
2. Peo­ple like mak­ing lists. Espe­cially lists about lists.
3. Espe­cially visual lists about visually-appealing things.
4. Peo­ple enjoy cov­et­ing pic­tures of awe­some things they’ll never have.
5. And most impor­tantly:  it’s fun!

What do kittens, web development, and home improvement have in common?

Answer: they’re all things that have kept me from blog­ging.  Sorry I’ve been so M.I.A. lately; my sin­cer­est apolo­gies to the two or three of you out there who actu­ally read here.

Here’s what’s been keep­ing me so busy (besides the usual moun­tain of work and side projects):

A Sad Goodbye

A few months ago, after 17 years of faith­ful, furry affec­tion, my beloved cat, Moo Kitty/Teedi/Oreo (she was known by many names), passed away.  Up until around late Jan­u­ary, she seemed to be in good health despite her age; ate well, still play­ful, all that sort of thing.  So I was taken by sur­prise when her ill­ness came on quite sud­denly (I sus­pect she had a bad stroke while I wasn’t at home) and rapidly grew worse.  I watched her closely for over a month, but she wasn’t mak­ing any improve­ment. Toward the end she com­pletely stopped eat­ing, could barely walk, acted con­fused, and would dis­ap­pear for long stretches of time.  (They say that ani­mals who know they’re going to die often go off alone to hide.) And so, I had to make the extremely dif­fi­cult deci­sion to have her put down. She had been a fam­ily pet since I was in 8th grade, out-lived sev­eral dogs, and even­tu­ally came to live with me when I bought my first home; my lit­tle four-legged room­mate.  She was good com­pany and I miss her dearly.

Hello, Kitty

It seems as soon as the word gets around that you’ve lost a pet, peo­ple start com­ing out of the wood­work try­ing to pawn a new one off on you.  Still in a bit of a mourn­ing phase (and warm­ing up to the idea of not hav­ing to clean lit­ter boxes any­more), I wasn’t at all excited when I heard that my mom’s friend had res­cued a lit­ter of kit­tens and was try­ing to find homes for them.  I buried myself in work and other projects for a while, and politely let it be known I wasn’t inter­ested.  That is, until Mom for­warded me an email with kitty pictures…and one of them just so hap­pened to look a lot like Moo Kitty. Ugh!

All right, so I caved.  His name is Simon Bel­mont.  At first it was just a funny, geeky ref­er­ence, but now his name is entirely fit­ting.  At three months old, he’s capa­ble of jump­ing impos­si­bly high, reg­u­larly per­forms leaps of faith, and whips his tail around like a weapon.  I haven’t seen him stake any vam­pires yet, but he takes on house­flies as if they were fly­ing Medusa heads.  As you can see from the photo above, he has a fond­ness for sit­ting on my lap­top.  For the first few weeks, get­ting any work done was nearly impos­si­ble unless I kept him con­fined to a dif­fer­ent room.

Super Secret Video Game Project

So, a friend of mine is devel­op­ing a video game for Google Chrome and has tapped me to design the game’s web­site.  I can’t say much about it yet, but I’m really excited to be involved in the project.  Expect to see more info about the game soon!

This Old Townhouse

I’ve become some­thing of a DIY week­end war­rior lately, hav­ing a bit of extra money from work­ing so much lately.  In the past few months I’ve installed hard­wood floors, closed off an entry­way for more wall space and divi­sion, put up crown mold­ing, hung  win­dow treat­ments, painted, primed…  Of course, I didn’t do all these won­der­ful things all by myself.  I have my amaz­ing father to thank, who, among other things, is a very tal­ented builder and a gen­er­ous soul (*cough* free labor *cough*).