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| Here are links to the games I've been working on:
John Deere: Harvest in the Heartland
Except ignore the box art. That was the art the publisher was going to use, but they then had Gary Bedell and I redo it. So feel free to laugh at the image, until they (we hope) update it with the REAL box art.
And the other one:
Dr. Suess' How the Grinch Stole Christmas
I may get to do the box art for this one solo, but haven't heard for sure yet.
I'm the primary animator on both of these games.
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| The Journey Out
At daybreak I'll lift
up my blankets until
I can just squeeze out from under them.
What more do you want? My body
must ache to be prostrate
or else I wouldn't hate this. So I'm staying
up later at night, reading by lamp glow,
pushing toward some rest and sustainable fuel
that I can stockpile for my waking
in hopes that tomorrow, maybe
I can get up at six-thirty a.m.
and look at the citron dawn glow instead
of a shower stall, mirror, and stove
until the minute before I go.
But if the voice in my chest were
astir at that hour, maybe
I could learn to sing in the shower rain
and look through the paste walls
before the windows are open. Everything
is a journey out; my self
a centrifugal origin, and all
but being static - every angle
outward-bound is aimed at You.
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| I have the sense that the Iraq war must be the most detached conflict we have yet experienced. Even in second grade, the Gulf War seemed much bigger than this, but perhaps not so politically embattled. Of course I don't watch television, and don't talk to many people about it, but still yet it seems like the issue of the war far exceeds the significance of the war itself - people dying, a nation under siege and now occupation. From the few snippets of news I catch (though it is horrible for me to say), the deathtoll of U.S. armed forces seems too minuscule to even call it a war (conflict has a quaint euphemistic ring), and yet every iota is a mini-headline. Not to devalue human life or play the cynic, but it seems as though the general feeling was that the U.S. was going into this war as an invincible disembodied force, and that now every life lost on our side is a shock. And yet people are even more incredulous of the winner of the World Series. Citizens emblazon their vehicles with "support our troops" stickers in the same fashion as would be done with Rams and Cardinals paraphernalia. There was even talk of a draft, and we are a nation of spectators. I do not even consider myself a spectator - there is very little inside of me that is not (I hate to say) ignorantly apathetic. Perhaps the part of me that is not is writing this post.
On a This American Life podcast from a few weeks ago, an Iraqi translator hired by the U.S. army was interviewed. He had to flee the country, leaving his wife and children behind (they later joined him) because his own countrymen had threatened his life. In fact, he was considered worse than the Americans, and might have even been in more danger of his life than a U.S. soldier. This surely says something about the attitude of certain sects within that culture, but what does it say about the ramifications of our country's actions upon individual citizens in that culture?
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by Mary Karr (though this is quite a bit more heavy-handed than my view):
Easter at Al Qaeda Bodega
At the gold speckled counter, my pal in white apron -
index finger tapping his Arabic paper,
where the body count dwarfs
the one in my Times - announces,
you're killing my people.
But in Hell's Kitchen, even the Antichrist
ought to have coffee - one cream
and two sugars. Blessings
upon you, he says, and means it.
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(notice that he means it, because the cream and sugars are examples of the blessings, the line ending as it is linking the two as a secondhand syntactic unit).
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| COVERS
The glowing vernal equinox brief
hours past, one afternoon it pours
hard, through my cracked car windows.
That eve, the A.C. gradually thunders
on, leaving my bare legs chilled
for the first time in a whole year.
My blood's warmth presses outward
rather than the chill soaking inward,
while I lie under a loose-weave coverlet.
I had seen a tulip tree in blossom
some hours before, with a spread of silky petals,
thick, all of magenta and blue-white,
which lay on the soil cooling the roots
while the cadmium orb warmed my crown
like an Apollo - staring straight through me.
But when he lay to dream in his rosy dusk,
the cuckolded solstice belched up drowsy smoke
to blanket this town - and I heard
of a forest a hundred miles off set aflame,
where there may have been or may not be
any magenta and blue-white blossoms.
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If you have any critical comments, I am all ears (or eyes, as it were). And now you're probably thinking "I'm not going to critique his poem, no way." But I did inquire. You can slip an anonymous note into my satchel pocket instead.
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|  | Currently Watching
Mirrormask
By Jason Barry, Dora Bryan, Rob Brydon, Stephen Fry, Andy Hamilton, Stephanie Leonidas, Robert Llewellyn, Gina McKee, Fiona Reynard, Nik Robson, Neil Gaiman, Lenny Henry
see related |
I was having a conversation with a coworker today at lunch; she was telling me about several televisions shows that she regularly watched. Of course, since I don't watch television anymore, I had nothing to contribute to the discussion except for how I had stopped watching it because I was so busy with college, and because I had become disgusted with the prevalence of reality television. So much of the reality t.v. floats somewhere between real-life drama and scripting, and I could perhaps enjoy one or the other, but not the quasi-reality. I had also some time ago (late 90s) become disenchanted with sitcoms, which were probably the more popular genre of that decade. If you don't know, I heard that reality t.v. was a reaction in part to television losing money, and not being able to pay writers - and since people will line up to be on t.v., they didn't have to pay actors for the most part, either. In thinking about sitcom leading into reality t.v. (due to this entertainment economics slump), and now reality television leading into the current era, which some are calling the "golden age" of television (says Ira Glass), I made a connection. Maybe you have made it already, or read it already, but perhaps you will forgive me for not making it sooner since I've hardly watched t.v. in the past 5 years. Most of the popular shows now, Lost being the most obvious example, have evolved from reality television (and are opposed to the sitcom) in that they are more realistic portrayals of human drama (especially of human interactions) in closed, somewhat unrealistic settings. I've never seen Lost, but from what I gather, it is a group of people stranded on a mysterious island, and the drama involves them trying to solve the mysteries and simultaneously deal with each other and the psychological side of it all. If you break it down, it's like Survivor meets Star Trek, except more psychologically realistic than the former, and more, shall we say, "fantastically" realistic than the latter. And the big difference is that it is not episodic (which I also despise) - it is a continuous story like reality t.v., rather than cut-and-past episodes where only the season premiers and finales really further the main plot. X-Files, as good as it was, still is episodic... so was The Pretender. (I really liked both of those when they were on). Essentially, the current television dramas took the elements of reality television that were actually the most real-to-life - continuous stories, human drama, etc. - and they have blended this with a healthy sense of fantasy (or unreality or escapism). I think it is a good step.
I just wanted to share that lightbulb moment with you all. And now I should probably watch Lost.
If you haven't, you should see Mirrormask. It's a bit like Amelie meets Legend meets City of Lost Children or Pan's Labyrinth... some of it is a bit stiff, and some of the special effects look artificial, but this illustrator (whose name I don't know... he worked on The Wolves in the Walls with Gaiman, who wrote that book and this movie), he did the concepts for the movie, and the whole things feels like his collage-styled work, except unfolded on a 3-dimensional world. So it's really visually interesting, and at times very beautiful.
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