THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Came back on the show this week and it was as if I’d never left.  I was handed 32 scenes to finish by the end of the week (yikes!) and I’m off and running. Time to earn my keep.

FAMILY

We had a baby shower this weekend. Lot’s of family and friends showed up. We received many helpful gifts. The shower itself was really nice and the food was fantastic.

I did my typical anti-social thing. I really don’t know why but I’m getting worse about hanging around people. When my brother and his wife Deborah showed up, I  spent my time with them, but that was mainly because they came over and sat down where I was at (and also asked to play a game with me). After talking for an hour or so, I took out two board games that I had brought and played it.  I’ll write about that another day.  I enjoyed myself.  They left early and I sat by myself thinking about stories and my next project.  A few people came by, sat down and talked to me for a few minutes but it wasn’t long before I was alone again thinking.

Later, Angelita, one of my cousin’s daughters, asked me if I wanted to play the board game TROUBLE (it’s that, LUDO/SORRY type game with the “Pop-O-Matic Bubble” that rolls the die for you). There where four of us playing, my three year old daughter was one and my two year old son was another.  My son lost interest quickly and Carolina (my cousin’s eldest daughter) took his place.

That game is awful. It’s such a bad game. We all thought so. You can’t leave the your “Home” base and start moving your pieces around the board unless roll a six.  Which you have no control over and if you manage to do so, if someone lands on your piece, you get that piece sent “Home” again.  It was such a bad game though, that it was actually fun.  We enjoyed making fun of it as we played and didn’t take it seriously at all since it was so luck driven.  I think, the best part about playing the game was that my daughter ended up winning.  She trounced us all.  She rolled so many sixes it was crazy.

Thanks you all for giving us such a good and memorable baby shower.

BOARD GAMES\VIDEO GAMES

I was listening to the Dice Tower Podcast Tuesday and I was made aware of a Carcassonne site that had all kinds of variant rules and printable tiles for the game.  If you like Carcassonne and you want to try new and fun ways to play it, I highly recommend it:

Carcassone Central

Also this site led me to discover a Carcassonne like game for the iPhone with a Sci fi theme that seems really cool called XENO SOLA. It looks cool.

ART

For Part 1 CLICK HERE.

For Part 2, CLICK HERE.

To be continued next week…

BLOGS

The Art Center Blog is fast becoming one of my favorite art drawing blogs to read.  There are a ton of great tips and drawing advice worth reading about there.

One of the article that I really enjoyed recently has been some videos they’ve put up on the merits of warm up sketching during figure drawing.

I highly recommend the article. To read it, CLICK HERE.

VIDEOS

So before I started back at work, I discovered and got addicted to watching yet another anime cartoon.  This time it’s a series sequel to one of my favorite animes SUPER DIMENSION FORTRESS MACROSS (the first part of what was called ROBOTECH in the U.S. which I wrote about show a few weeks back). The sequel I’m now watching is called MACROSS FRONTIER. It aired in Japan in 2008 and has not yet seen a U.S. release.

When I became aware of this show, I thought I’d give it a look because I’ve been recently re-watching the original 1980s MACROSS.  I wasn’t really expecting to like it much.  Mostly because I haven’t really gotten into too many anime cartoons in years.  Also, because the last two MACROSS shows I’d seen, didn’t really blow me away either.  Namely, MACROSS 2 (which was pretty bad), MACROSS PLUS Vol. 1-4 (which looked fantastic and were fun to watch but the story didn’t blow me away) and MACROSS 7 (which was a sequel series to the original MACROSS, that was just plain dumb).  This one though, knocked my socks off. It had enough call backs and archetypes from the original MACROSS show to make it feel familiar, but at the same time, they changed things enough so that it’s new. In fact, if you’re familiar with the original show, there is a type of inside joke fake out that they do all the way through the series where you think they’re writing the same story and then turn you’re expectations on their heads.  It’s great.

Besides, I just can’t help watching cool robots fighting aliens. Especially when the robots transform from jets into robots. The effects on the robots and vehicles are mostly CG.

MACROSS is known for one of the female protagonists who ends up becoming a famous pop singer.  This meant the show had a singing component in it that sometimes made it a very lite musical. This version follows the tradition only I actually like the music for once and don’t find it annoying.

I’m also a big sucker for love triangles in my anime (as you can see from my own comic above) and this one has that too.

This is a fun cartoon to watch if you’re a MACROSS fan like me. Best MACROSS since the original. I’m not sure if the show will have the same impact on someone who hasn’t seen the original version but you might enjoy it anyway.  Give it a shot if you can find it online.

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