I'm posting a lot of quickie illustrations on here lately, huh! The trouble is, most of my more worked-up drawings I've been doing lately I can't show you, so I guess I'm just going to have to come to terms with this blog being pretty sparse for a good while. This one's for Game Developer Magazine- it is Gears of War's sensitively-depicted and thoroughly researched African-American character 'Cole Train'.

Gears Of War, to my tastes, is a pretty horrible game. Did you know that less than two percent of the world's game developers are of African heritage? And the rest are really awful white guys who listen to Dragonforce? That second fact was made up, but it's the impression one might get from games like this. Let me give you an example of how dumb-as-a-rock the writing is in this game: see, there are these hulking gorilla-like aliens who shout 'BOOM' at you whenever they fire their weapon. Then your black wingman Cole Train's catchphrase is
'BOOM, BABY!' Give or take one word, they gave the hulking ape and the black guy the same fucking catchphrase! Not only that, but they took that catchphrase from the wacky black sidekick in a Dreamworks animated movie, so it's not even their own racism. That line is in the trailer, in fact! That's pretty lazy! Although, to be fair, I think if I was to write an epic drama about the horrors of war on a faraway planet, I would probably research it by combing through the DVD extras for Shrek and the Emperor's New Groove, too.

I am still totally up for adding Wii friends, hit me up with your friend code so we can trade miis, lolcats, pretend it is christmas 2007

Hey! My Wii friend code is 3504 6941 3246 8657. Message me with your code, I will send you secret christmas miis maybe

Ironically, given the title, this blog post will be very short:

My friends and I have left Livejournal alone lately; tumblr and twitter seems to allow us to do all this stuff a lot more easily, at the expense of the wordcount. The luddite in me worries: the biggest fear I have is that the emergent culture of microblogging (where our attention spans have shortened to the point where anything over two paragraphs is answered with 'TL:DR') will ultimately limit thought and expression on a wider scale.

As the invention of the ballpoint pen caused a worldwide decline in the art of penmanship, our new methods of communication could leard to verbal and literary articulacy becoming a dying art, too. Unlike grandpa shaking his fist at mobile phones and pudding pops, I think this is a legitimate concern; the less we can articulate big concepts, the less we can even think about them, and synthesise new ones. As other commenters have said, our TL:DR culture fulfils the same function of 1984's 'newspeak'; a self-imposed Orwellianism.

Though it's easier for humans to communicate now than in any point in history, generally the users of digital social media choose to stifle the exchange of ideas through peer pressure, too: introspection is sneered at as being 'emo', any lengthy discourse is 'TL:DR'. The aforementioned seem to be a right afforded only to those who create a pedestal for themselves, not the online proletariat, the average user- who has as much room to talk as anybody.

I'm as guilty of this as anybody; perhaps even more, since I'm not as full of words as the people I admire- but to me, it seems as if with TL:DR we're rejecting our own evolution, choosing to hide in the sea despite the legs we've been given.

I drew this on the bus home from the studio last night. Rebecca is my sister

My copy of Electric Ant arrived! 





You can buy it from here: http://electricantzine.com/





I made it to the back cover.



Awww yeah!


Also: look, here are the packages I sent y'all




I have been dipping in and out of this thing on the bus to work, and there's a really interesting article about the Takarazuka Revue in Japan - the all-female form of theatre that informs the sensibilities of a vast chunk of japanese comic books. If you've ever wondered why even the dudes in japanese comics look like girls, Takarazuka theatre is kind of the rosetta stone to understanding about that. There's also a lot- a LOT- of amazing art by some of my favorite people, like deforgeo , Hellen Jo, and Derek Yu, and a collaboration by Anthony Ha and Anthony Wu, forming a creative team which if they've not at least once thought about calling 'WuHa' then something is up.  All in all, i give it three thumbs up. Recommended!

Oh yeah, and see some more work I did for the zine here: http://blog.electricantzine.com/maybe-next-issue-of-electric-ant-zine-should

 I illustrated Tim Roger's column at Kotaku.com, 'can videogames be our friends?' The plan is that this is going to be a monthly gig.



Here's Tim in his Mii Plaza, full of identical miis of the same woman which he creates obsessively. I didn't really have the time to make sure this illustration conveyed the emotions I wanted to capture! PROTIP: in a pinch, a black rain cloud with an x in it is a pretty cheap stand-in for "an undefinable sense of 21st century ennui"

Hopefully next month's illo' will be a little less dashed-off. It's funny- even though I busted it out on an extremely quick turnaround, this is the most professional-looking, magazine-y drawing I've done in a while. Turns out the visual tropes that characterize modern magazine illustration are also the devices you employ when you want to make something with as little time or effort as possible. Who knew!

Third time's the charm, perhaps? From the description: "I drew this to help myself come to terms with the fast-approaching moment of my death, fighting space apes in 2012." You can vote for this shirt by clicking the picture below.

Hey! Thanks to inechi  and Cafe Con Leche, you can now buy stickers of my designs (featuring such popular characters as Qraka Sutin, Sherrif Lava, and a turtle) at http://web.me.com/inechi/cafe_con_leche/stickrshj.html

Yours for only 20 pesos! 

This time last year, I was in South Korea teaching English; I don't know if I ever detailed our Korean Hallowe'en on this blog, but myself and another teacher, Marika, spent all day turning one room of our school into an honest-to-goodness Hallowe'en house, complete with cobwebs, gravestones and bowls of peeled grapes and a jar we told the kids were eyeballs. We even dressed the gym teacher as a zombie and laid him in a cardboard coffin, daring the kids to sneak past him to retrieve a token, redeemable for a green food-colouring witch cookie.


Somehow this adventure playground failed to ignite the fires of their imagination in the way we intended- I guess if you have no concept of a make-believe haunted house to begin with, no very special garfield halloween specials telling you what to expect, and the only adults charged with passing down the flame of the tradition around are two pale idiots dressed as a zombie and a zombie horse respectively, who don't speak your language, it's going to be hard to see a bunch of chairs with a black sheet over the top as a haunted labyrinth. The one aspect they did get a firm grasp on was that at some point, grown-ups are going to give you free sweets, and so our halloween room quickly became an orderly queue of kids lining up to say 'GIMME CANDY'. I don't even know where they got that phase from! I had taught them to say trick or treat!

These drawings, here, are from last Halloween. As much as I could, I tried to work drawing-themed games into my teaching, such as asking the kids to describe to me a monster, in English, which I would draw on the board - 'He has a big face, he has seven eyes', and so on. I'd also let the kids take turns to draw, too, and we would end up with some pretty amazing creations- surreal , compound, imaginitive characters with no precedent in either fact or fable. Above right, you can see my redrawing of a doodle one little girl did completely independently of our drawing games. It's an original work by one person acting alone, and yet the tropes of our drawing games are all there- two pig's noses? So I guess I was pretty pleased with how things were working out- their drawings were becoming influenced by me, and mine were influenced by them- a cross-cultural feedback loop.

The drawings I've posted below are all pretty faithfully based on the kid's Halloween drawings, refined by me whenever necessary, but mostly unchanged from their originals.



So, our hallowe'en drawing game- in it, I wrote descriptions of the standard Hallowe'en monsters on a piece of paper, and the kids had to write which monster was being talked about, and draw a picture of it. That's where 'Qrakasutin' comes from. The name might need a bit of explanation! See, native Korean speakers have difficulty saying the constenant 'eff', pronouncing it more of a 'puh' sound, which I guess led Jin Jin to think the famous movie monster was called 'Prankenstien.' Added to that her creative, scattershot approach to spelling English words and a backwards 'p' and you've got a pretty triumphant piece of mispelling.





Above left, my take on what 'Prankenstien' might look like.




I love how effortlessly the children abstracted and reinvigorated the well-worn visual tropes of the Halloween monsters. For instance, without having learned aurally that Frankenstien's monster has 'two bolts in its neck', they've seen fit to add the bolts wherever they like, and as many as they like. I think this kind of naive irreverence has been very influential to me in the past year or so, informing everything from the cats with hats I drew to t-shirt designs and logos for rap groups. I think I stopped being a teacher just as I started to feel like I was getting good at it- however, through my work, the experience I had there continues to bear fruit to this day.

Have a great halloween!

Hey, a while back a reader told me she was planning on dressing as a 'Harveyjames girl' for Hallowe'en. To that reader: Are you still planning on doing it? Take pictures!

To the girls who asked for fabric swatches: They're in the post

To Liz Greenfield: your t-shirt is in the post

To Ashlee Simpson: You don't get a t-shirt :(

Speaking of which, the first batch of attractmo.de game girl t-shirts arrived about a week ago. Here's our model daphaknee, with hers:



Mine arrived, too. If you got one, take a picture of yourself wearing it and post it in the comments, maybe Adam will use your picture on his site or somethin'. 

Oh hey, also, if you don't have a t-shirt, get the handheld gaming object of your choice and re-enact the shirt design! I will be upfront: you won't win anything, for doing either of these things, I just get off on telling people what to do