It’s Dana again. As you may or may not know, I’ve been working as an animator for several years now on a variety of different projects. It’s a pretty fun job, which makes the bouts of unemployment and total lack of job security almost worth it. But anyway, this week I thought I’d share some animated shorts by some very talented people. Most of these are rarely seen by the general public, but thankfully sites like YouTube now make them much more accessible.

“Simon’s Cat” by Simon Tofield

This is actually one of a series of shorts. If anyone has a cat I’m sure they can relate to this.

“Adventure Time” by Pendleton Ward

Ok this is a little long, but I swear it’s totally worth it. I think Mike was the one who introduced me to this, which pretty much explains why we’re such good friends.

I heard that they’re making this into a TV series, which is very exciting news for me (I don’t get out much).

Some people may already know Don Hertzfeldt from his “Rejected” short ( in HD!), so here’s one of his earliest films.  His more recent work is only available on DVD, and you can find them on his website.

And just for fun, here’s something I animated at work a few years back:

Thanks for reading/watching!

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-Mike

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A comic about tentacle rape after coming back from Las Vegas. Kismet anyone?

If you’ve no idea what tentacle rape is, google at your own peril (really, really really not safe for work).

This week I’m going to (finally) be updating our web site. Besides all the visual and technical changes, I have to do some work on the back end, so if I crash the shit out of everything, please forgive me. I’m not expecting any calamities, but then, that’s thing about calamities: you don’t expect them.

I’m hoping all the work will be done by next Sunday.

SONGS TO CHECK OUT THIS WEEK:

• “Hospital Beds”–Cold War Kids. A fun little piano beat + lead singer Nathan Willett’s pleasant yowling = a good time.
• “Nothing Compares 2 U”–Me First and the Gimme Gimmes. Probably my favorite Me First song, the happy, punked-up ’50s instrumentation is somehow perfect for an otherwise melancholy piece. That and the vocals add an air of petulant sarcasm that I can’t help but find really appealing and fitting given the song’s subject matter. I’ve never heard the original version, which was written by Prince for a band called “The Family,” but you can find the popular Sinead O’Connor version pretty easily here or here.
• “She-Wolf”–Megadeth. A pick for Lead Paint’s metal fans this week. Megadeth’s album Cryptic Writings is a definite favorite from my youth, She-Wolf being one of best tracks off that CD. Both ridiculous and awesome at the same, I challenge anyone to listen to this song and not marvel at how hard it rocks while simultaneously being baffled by its absurdity. What kind of absurdity you ask? Well, here are the first few lines of lyrics: “The mother of all that is evil/ Her lips are poisonous venom/ Wicked temptress knows how to please/ The priestess roars, ‘Get down on your knees.’”

<3 Mike

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In third grade I was in a school play about the Winter Olympics (nonsensical, I know). I had like two lines, and I send them backwards, stuttering.

HI EVERYBODY! I’m a little busy getting ready to bounce to Vegas for a week, but here are a few quick things:

• The single-cartridge multiplayer in Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes is surprisingly horrible. Not only can you not pick your faction, units or any artifacts, the load time for each game is probably close to five minutes, no exaggeration. Even funnier, one the game ends, the person without the cart is forced to shut his/her DS off, adding even more time onto each round you want to play. I suppose it’s a lot to ask to have the game share well via only one copy, it’s just a shame that such a great game has to suffer so bad in this area.

SOME SONGS TO CHECK OUT THIS WEEK:

• “I like you so much better when you’re naked” –Ida Maria. A silly, poppy song, but I find its cheerfulness impossible to resist.
• “Shop Vac” –Jonathon Coulton. J.C. manages to make an aged, crumbling marriage funny somehow.
• “Brick by Boring Brick” –Paramore. I realize I’m not doing my punk-rock cred any favors this week, but I can’t get enough of this song. Like the message, like the instrumentation, and Iove the singer’s voice. Talk about a nice set of pipes.
• “Close To Me” –Valencia, covering the cure. A video from my local alt-rock station which I highly recommend hiding behind another window and not watching. Gross camera work aside, it’s a nice cover of one of my favorite songs.

Next week I guess I should do all death metal or grindcore songs so everyone reading doesn’t realize I’m a total sissy too quickly.

<3 Mike

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These are the kinds of punchlines you end up writing when you spent a good portion of your childhood watching Ren & Stimpy.

• Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes is pretty fun, if a little repetitive and slow at times. It’s definitely one of those games that gets you to pull the “Whoops it’s been like five hours somehow” moves, which I think we can all agree is the mark of a good game. I haven’t tried the multiplayer yet, but I’ll let you know once I test it out.
• As I mentioned last week, the Hulk vs. Thor/Wolverine movies were pretty good. I would definitely pick it up if you were a fan of the old ’90s X-men cartoon. They’re very similar to those old cartoons, containing a lot of fan service and semi-obscure references, except with better animation and a little more blood (yay!). Plus, Deadpool is in the Wolverine film a fair bit, and definitely steals his share of scenes. The best thing about the Thor film was the sound effect Thor’s hammer made when it hit the Hulk. Think of the end scene in Casino in the cornfield. It’s kind of like that.
• I leave for Vegas early next week for work. If anyone is wondering, Vegas is one of my least favorite places on Earth. It’s like being trapped inside a shopping mall 24/7, except everyone smokes and a pretzel costs $47.50. It’s a glorious five days of airports, fat sweaty morons and people who are convinced a xeroxed flyer of two women kissing is going to change my mind about wanting a herpes-ridden escort. The best part of Vegas is leaving it, which feels like fleeing Mordor as Sauron’s evil tower crumbles. All flying on the back of a giant eagle, screaming “Eat shit goblin scum” and getting pretty psyched to party with Rosie Cotton.

<3 Mike

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Pretty soon, Avery is probably going to close her eyes and just daydream about Delta Force.

Happy post-annual gift day everyone! I hope everyone received a few excellent presents this year. I myself picked up Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes for the DS, as well as the Hulk vs. Wolverine/Thor DVD, which perhaps I’ll write a little about later. More importantly though,  if anyone has any awesome presents they want to talk about, they should do it in the comment section, because I think we all know it’s a fun thing to talk about gifts and their associated radness.

Say you don’t want to talk about presents though. In fact, you’re pretty sure you want to talk about some moving pictures. IT’S TOTALLY COOL, DON’T WORRY, I CAN DO THAT.

SHERLOCK HOLMES: I was not that impressed. I don’t know, I guess I’m becoming a kind of action movie curmudgeon, but I thought the movie was lacking in a bunch of places. There are things most would assume to be lame in the movie, like overly predictable plot points and Rachel McAdams plain-yogurt-with-tits acting method, but in a Christmas “Blockbuster” movie, that kind of crap is sort of expected. What’s not okay though is a main plot that makes no sense overall and a villain who might as well be Dr. Evil from Austin Powers. It’s hard to talk about the movie without spoiling things, so let me just say if you can’t handle villains with using complicated and unnecessary Dr. Evil-esque methods to try and rule the world or kill the main characters, then you need to skip this movie because it happens like 10 times.

I get that the villain is supposed to be a sadistic egomaniac/crazy person, but even still, most of his schemes seem set up with one of the primary goals being “totally fail and let Sherlock Holmes ruin everything.”

Speaking of failure, check out this video I found on the internets. It’s an actual how-to video on how to make GRILLED CHEESE. Some of our older readers might remember this comic we wrote about the disgusting sandwich from way back. To this day, months and months after being published, it’s still one of our most popular comics. Not only that, we actually get a lot of search traffic from google from people keying in “how to make a grilled cheese sandwich,” which is horrible because who the hell can’t figure that one out?

This video does not really answer that question, though it does assume that anyone watching it is completely retarded. It’s the most literal and meanest instructional on how to make grilled cheese that anyone could reasonably expect to find on the web. I highly recommend giving it a watch, if for nothing else than to be able to ask yourself, “who the hell could be that stupid to actually need ANY of this advice?”

<3 Mike

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My favorite part of this comic is looking at the tiny sliver of screen we can see on Colin’s TV and trying to guess what video game he’s playing. I doubt Dana intended this, but I swear to God it looks like he’s playing Dragon Warrior, which was basically my favorite game as a kid. So what I’m getting at is I’m pretty sure Dana is telepathic.

Not much else too exciting to report. I’ve wrapped up my two weeks of hell at work, which is predictably rad. Less rad is the fact that we got slutted here in the Philly area with about two feet of snow. TWO FEET. So I’m pretty tired from shoveling snow all day. I do want to make sure before I sign off this week’s post that I thank everyone who has been reading our comic this year.

I do not like to get in the habit of speaking for Dana, but I know that we’re in agreement for how great you all have been this year. This has been a rough year for everyone, but for Dana and I, you’ve all done a lot to make it really fantastic. So thanks again, and next week hopefully I’ll be back to blogging about the best kind of dragon or if muppets were real, what kinds of drugs to do you think they would like.

<3 Mike

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Related news, they just announced a sequel to Batman: Arkham Asylum. See the trailer here.

Hmm. Very busy with work this week, which I’m sure you know from your own experiences, is total bullshit. I spent yesterday, a Saturday mind you, writing a marketing story about umbrellas. Today, it will be a marketing story about nonprofits. Tomorrow, I will be writing about yoga apparel and cheer/dancewear (yes, that is a real thing, I swear). I don’t really much mind working on the weekends (except that I totally do), it’s more that I hate rushing my writing. Rushed work, for me at least, always turns out poorly, which makes me depressed. Depression for me manifests in eating bags of Chex Mix while watching Dennis Quaid movies on AMC and thinking of ways I can become a welfare cheat. End result: I become a more terrible person from working hard, though only slightly (when not overworked afterall, I still do love me some Dennis Quaid).

Enough with the self-indulgent blather. Let us move on to more interesting things, like …

RSS READERS! Does anyone have any recommendations? I am just starting with the RSS fun, using Google Reader, but if anyone has any other suggestions, I would love to hear them!

… OR HOW ABOUT FLASH GAMES? Lately I’ve been playing Monster’s Den: Book of Dread on Kongregate. It’s a pretty fun old-school dungeon crawler. I like it because you can play it really small bits because it auto-saves after every encounter. It’s a little challenging and there’s a decent amount of strategy in skill and party choice, but it can also be a bit repetitive like other old-school RPGs, so heads up on that.

WAIT! YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT OUR SITE DESIGN? I’M DOWN FOR THAT! You guys periodically speak up and gives us pointers on things Dana and I should improve on the Web site, and we love that. I’m hoping that over Christmas, the new site is either going to be up, or well underway. Off the top of my head, here is what will be showing up on the new site:

• Bigger, brighter logo, navigation and menu buttons
• A new color scheme and “look”
• Reworked social networking/subscription buttons to make them more intuitive and easier to find (sort of in place now, but we’re going to be adding more, making things clearer, and fixing up the left sidebar as well).
• Fixed-up left sidebar with new links and buttons
• Addition of right sidebar, which we’re going to put a link roll, something like, “Friends,” “Dana Likes,” and “Mike likes”
• Random comics button, as well as possibly a “help transcribe” button from ohnorobot
• Separate comicpost/newspost areas in the blog, letting us add news without posting a new comic
• Some kind of Fav icon for our site in your browser bar, as well as your favorites folder

Other features will be added later on, like custom art for our search landing page, a characters page, and maybe a prettier archive, but those improvements are slated a bit further off. If you have any suggestions for other things we should add, please don’t hesitate to say so!

FINALLY, HERE ARE SOME SONGS FOR YOU THIS WEEK!

• Dropkick Murphys–”Amazing Grace.” No song will make you want to kick ass more, and put you in a good mood besides.
• Jonathan Coulton–”Someone is Crazy.” Male or female, I’m sure you’ll be able to relate to this hilarious song about a psycho significant other. Also, there’s a banjo, so win/win here.
• Grand Buffet–”Americus (Religious Right Rock)”–Catchy little rap song with the best chorus ever. Teaser: Here is the first line, “I’ve got a shirt made by little girls’ hands in a little warehouse on a little island.” Fantastic.

<3 Mike

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This comic will become less funny once Michael Bay sees it and uses it as the script for Transformers 3.

Not too much new to report this week. Dana and I are more or less done with the new site designs, so that’s exciting I suppose. I’m going to be very busy with work for the next few weeks, but I still expect the new look to be popping up in the not-too-distant future.

MUSIC TIME (a.k.a. “Songs that Mike is listening to):

Jonathon Coulton: “Code Monkey.” Even though it’s about computer programming, I’m sure 99% of people who work in a office will appreciate the sentiment of the song. 

MC Lars: “Mr. Raven.” A half-silly/half-rad rap interpretation of the old Edgar P. poem.

Mike Birbiglia: “You’d be surprised.” A great stand-up comedy track that rambles a bit but still kicks ass (wait for the part about awkwardness). Also, if you’re wondering, the rest of the album is just as strong.

<3 Mike

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