Wheee, I’m home sick today, recovering from the light head cold that Rym has so kindly shared with me.  I’ll probably finish the last story painting I have to do for Guns of Icarus (Take a look at the trailer here!), the steampunk-airship-sky-pirate-all-around-things-that-I-like PC game that me and the small team at Muse put together.  For as little as we are, I think we did a pretty decent job.

On the train the other day, I wrote a script for a promotional comic which centered around Aya, a pilot who I would write about when I was a young teen.  I went through this phase where I was obsessed with stories about youths who fly fighter planes in the desert to defend against the air pirates hordes, and Aya was an imagined character about whom I wrote quite a few stories back then.  I think her arrival coincided directly with when I first saw the movie of Nausicaa, and I decided that weird airplanes were WHERE IT’S AT! or maybe before that when I was into The Rocketeer (one of my favorite movies of a kid).  Anyway, Aya’s world and the Guns of Icarus setting are so similar that they’ve kind of become merged in my head, and the tomboy ace and the airship pilot from the game exist parallel in the same world.  It’s one of the moments when I realize that “Wow, I’m making art for stories that I would have dreamed of making when I was young.”  It’s a nice feeling.

In other news, I am one more older now.  It was a pretty low key birthday - I went to work, finished a painting, and went out for noodles with Alex and Brian.  By the time I got home my nose was running like crazy, and I took some allergy meds that made me all loopy and drunkish, but I managed to make a good dinner despite that.  (I also found that throwing a left over spinach salad with mushrooms and bacon in chicken broth with onions and eggdrop makes a surprisingly decent batch of soup!)  It seems that now I am officially an adult, not age wise but lifestyle-wise.  I cooked my own birthday dinner, bought my own cheesecake from Eileen’s, and washed up the dishes afterwards, which seems a very adult thing to do.  Scott and Rym were also over. Scott’s car had a dead battery about which he inconsolable, but he ate the proffered food and only whined quietly.  All in all, hooray.  (Well, except for the post-nasal drip.)

Welp, I’ve got some time to kill at Grand Central waiting for my train out, so I figured I’d use the time to do something if not exactly productive, at least having the semblance of being so.  Something I haven’t done for months and months, I’ll bring an old project out of storage and try my hand at it again.  I’m finally going to *gasp* update my BLOG!  A novel concept! My rationale is thus:  If I can successfully find the will (for it’s really not a question of time, considering the long-ass commute I have to look forward to daily) to update this baby three times a week, perhaps with the additional prettification of my portfolio site, I may find that I do indeed have the where-with-all to get off my tail and do some sort of serially updated internet art thing.  One of these days, I’ll attain my great and momentous dream of being internet famous for a second!  Just see if I don’t!

Speaking of art things, though, I have been motivated out of my animator’s funk lately by the kind gift of a somewhat elderly tablet PC.  A generous co-worker, upon leaving the company, was apparently moved enough by my appreciation of it (brought on by a nerd girl’s perpetual gadget fetish) to entrust it into my care.  New computer hardware is great, but free and art-worthy computers are a joy to be rivaled by few things in life.  In any case, not having a Flash license (even if I had the cash, the trial of CS4 was like molassas on this guy.), I have been rocking Pencil, an open-source, no-frills animation program.  The name is accurate, for it’s pretty much just a digital version of animator’s pencil and a stack of punched paper.  I love it, I think.