I know, I know, I’m not supposed to post baby stuff on this website (I’m supposed to post it on THIS website instead), but you’ll have to indulge me this weekend because:
It’s Avery’s First Birthday today!
Carrie & I each made a costume for her by hand for Halloween, and we’re proud of our work!
So here were our Halloween Costumes for 2014!
Avery’s Costume #1:
My Neighbor Li’l Totoro!
The Tiniest Totoro!
Yes! I cut and sewed a tiny Totoro costume! It even has a zipper running up the back to the top of the hood. I’d never sewed anything with a zipper before! We took her to Zoo Boo in this costume and it was completely adorbs. If you don’t know who Totoro is, (A) Shame on you! And (B) look it up. Trust me, it’s great.
Avery’s Costume #2:
Wee Cacklin’ Witch!
A li’l witch and her (grumpy) cat!
Carrie made the tutu, and I embroidered the pumpkin on the black onesie (using a very fancy Brother XV8500D Embroidery Machine at my work), and Carrie made the embellishments on the witch hat. Collaboration at it’s finest!
We decided quite a while ago that it would be pretty durned cute to dress Avery up as a witch for Halloween. One of the main reasons is because she has such an excellent witch’s cackle! Just listen:
See? Perfect for a wee cacklin’ witch!
My Costume:
A working version of “Atari Combat”
Old-School 2600-Style
It has always been a dream of mine to make a working video game for my costume, and this year I finally figured it out. I made a working version of the classic game “Combat” for the Atari 2600! It’s pretty sweet. Here it is in action:
Carrie is not big on dressing up in costumes, but we did get her to put on a matching witch hat (and she was wearing a black dress), so that counts, right?
My Witchy Women
And just for funsies, here’s the punkin I carved this year:
Wait… that’s not a punkin at all, BUT A HIDEOUS ROBOT! The horror!
It’s true that the wife and I are having a wee beb. But of course we’re not the only ones. My friend Jeremiah and his wife are expecting a wee beb of their own in just a couple of weeks. Because they’re awesome, they’re doing a space-age-and-robots theme. And Jeremiah commissioned me to add to the room by doing a series of small robot paintings!
So I painted three 8″ × 10″ paintings. And here they are!
It was good to get back into painting; I hadn’t done anything like this for quite a long time.
Schmancy’s “Plush You!” exhibit/sale is happening this year on October 13th from 11:00 AM to 6:00 PM. I can’t find much information about the actual event on Schmancy’s website, but there is a Facebook event about it.
More French awesomeness, this time an artist who takes plastic bottles and other detritus and transforms them into incredible robot sculptures: Bottlerobots!
Happy Festivus, everyone! I hope you get to air some good grievances. I hope the plain aluminum pole is not too distracting. And I hope you win the Feats of Strength!
Here I’m going to round-up a big random heaping of things I’ve found interesting recently. Artists, websites, musics, games, whatever. In random order:
Michaela Eaves
I saw her at a studio open house where she had some paintings and prints out for display. I really dug the way her paintings have heavy outlines, and the way the lines break up the colors in such a way that her paintings almost look like stained glass.
She also had an adorable painting of a rocket ship, done in a soft, children’s book style of painting. I dug it, but I can’t find a picture on her website (which is mostly about her graphic design & illustration business): www.michaelaeaves.com
8-Bit Jesus
I thought this was pretty spectacular. Not only did Doctor Octoroc (sic) make 8-bit chiptune versions of many Christmas songs for his album 8-Bit Jesus, but he also wrote them in the specific styles of various 8-bit video games. My favorites are definitely “Carol of the Belmonts,” “Bubbles We Have Heard on High,” and “8 Days of Master Robots,” which very excellently captures the essence of the Mega Man experience. Also, “Icarus! The Herald Angels Sing” is quite accurate. Check it out: http://www.doctoroctoroc.com/8BitJesus/
Machinarium
Machinarium is a beautifully done, old-style, point-and-click adventure video game, unbelievably done entirely in Flash. I like it ’cause it’s about robots. But more than that, the world is completely enthralling, and the puzzles all involve robot logic more than real-world logic.
The art style is pretty much spectacular. You can play a demo for free, or buy and download the full version here: http://machinarium.net/
Kaiju Dance to Thriller
Just what the title says: a bunch of Kaiju dance to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”
This woman takes shoes and tastefully collages them with pages from Wonder Woman comic books. She tends to use mostly monochromatic images, so the effect is a little subtler than you might expect.
Taisha McGee sells what she calls “Ugly Scarves.” They’re mostly actually quite pretty, but she nevertheless gives them hilarious names based loosely on their color schemes, names like “Mulched Roses,” “Tidy Bowl,” “Moldy Cheese,” “Mushy Froot Loops,” and my favorite, “Regurgitated Thanksgiving Dinner.” She also has the sense of humor to take photos of the scarves wrapped around a cardboard stand-up of John Wayne. Bravo!
An artist whose work I saw in a tea shop in Downtown Tacoma (Mad Hat Tea, 1130 Commerce Street) and I liked the humor and simplicity in it. I also really appreciated how most of the paintings were really small; a lot of ’em were only like 6″ × 6″, and I don’t think anything of hers gets over 20″ in any direction.
TheSixtyOne.com is a fascinating idea for a democratic music website, where the more people like a song the more popular it becomes, and ANYONE can upload ANY song they’ve created (as long as they’re legally allowed to blah, blah, blah, y’know).
Not only that, but it turns listening to music into kind of an RPG. You gain experience (called “reputation”) and rise in levels. There are quests (like “Listen to 7 recently-uploaded songs” or “Listen to the radio stations of 5 other people for 5 minutes each”) that let you earn experience and “hearts,” which you can use to mark a song as a favorite (i.e., you heart the song). And you also earn experience as other people later heart songs that you previously hearted. The more reputation you have, the more likely other people are to listen to your opinions (in theory at least). So you get tangible rewards for finding new, unheard songs that you really like and then getting other people to like them as well, other than the reward of discovering good music.
Also, TheSixtyOne.com is the only place right now where you can hear Taisha’s musc (yes, the same Taisha that makes those scarves). Just go here: http://www.thesixtyone.com/taisha/
A Very Alan Thickemas
THE Alan Thicke, Leeni, and puppets. Lots and lots of puppets. And Blake Lewis is somehow involved. It exists, I just have no idea of how to see it. Other than these:
