Free SNES Sprites? Yes Please.

Posted on 29th March 2011 in Something Daily

I discovered a site called nes-snes sprites a few days ago that has a huge collection of (you guessed it) NES and SNES sprites, often in all of their animation states, available for download. Right now it’s just great for nostalgia value for me, but I’m thinking about making some gifs with them, or maybe putting one on the header of my site. The site also has a decent collection of soundtracks from those two systems, which I’m almost inclined to put on my iPod and listed to for fun. I have a serious thing about chip music.

Posting daily starts to become difficult around the middle of the semester, for one reason or another. Sometimes it’s the increasing workload from classes, but it’s always the “stuff is happening” mindset that starts to kick in soon after midterms. Even if it’s not incredibly busy, there’s this feeling of having places to be and stuff to do. At least there is for me. Of course, I feel like I always have some project or another, and the more enthusiastic I get about whatever it happens to be, the less time I find myself having to do almost anything else. But that’s just me. Also, my living space is quite often much louder than it needs to be, mainly due to myself and my roommates all being close to 20 years old, fans of music, and owning big speakers. This sometimes makes it hard to concentrate on anything, which is a big reason that I’ve been spending more time in the courant library recently.

Speaking of my website, the design/development process is going well. The method I had been using to retrieve a Twitter feed via the Twitter API wasn’t working under Ubuntu, so I figured I’d at least attempt to make that better. As it turns out, I’m able to use a very similar method to the one described yesterday to get the tweet data from an RSS feed. Also, I’ve added some cool-looking stylistic elements to the homepage design, and given the header (my name) the Double Dragon treatment, which I was able to do with a font I found here and a bit of Gimping.

Also, my roommate gave me his GameBoy Pocket today! The stars have aligned in my favor! I was just starting to think about buying one, and then this happens. Seriously, that is awesome. I also picked up Street Fighter II Turbo yesterday, which is of course much harder than I remember it being. Ryu is quite annoying with the Haduoken.

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I Knew Having a Skateboard With Uglydolls on it Would Come in Handy Eventually

Posted on 6th December 2010 in Something Daily

Long title, huh? But it’s true. I crack myself up.

Last night I went out to a free show at the Upright Citizens’ Brigade theater. I’ve only been to one other sketch show (Second City in Chicago), but I figure that the UCB stage is more like a venue that Nirvana played before they were popular than a “theater”. The stage was raised about three inches off of the floor, and the low-ceilinged room was packed full of people from literally on the stage to the back wall. Speaking of on the stage, that’s where London and I sat. No chairs, just sitting on the floor with the improvisers right in our faces. Actually, that was one of the things that made it such an awesome experience. we arrived at the theater after the lines had already been formed, so there were no seats left. Instead of getting sent to the back of the room, they let us sit up front.

Anyway, the show was awesome and ridiculous. I’m pretty sure the guy who plays mc chris’ manager on “mc chris is dead” was in the show last night. His voice was pretty much identical…but I can’t find him anywhere on the internet! I don’t really know what to look for. Also, I’ve learned the benefits of actually going out once in a while, as London and I made some new friends who we met in the front row. Sketch improv is awesome, and Upright Citizens Brigade does a free show every Sunday. I’m definitely going back.

I’m listening to Electric Wizard at an unhealthy level and procrastinating on my Music Theory homework by writing this and browsing reddit. Electric Wizard are a great stoner metal band from England. I have one of their albums (Dopethrone) that’s made up mostly of disgustingly slow, crunchy guitar grooves that slowly build to something quite metal indeed.

I revised the “About Me” page today, and I’m contemplating the drawing of a new banner for the homepage. Not making one in Gimp, but actually drawing things. We’ll see how that goes, and if I have time for it in the next few weeks (which will be getting crazy due to finals stress compounded by my laziness). Somewhere during that time, I’m going to get some friends together, drink hot chocolate, and watch “A Charlie Brown Christmas”. Because that’s what we do when it gets cold and snowy outside.

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Wario Land

Posted on 29th October 2010 in Something Daily

Wario Land 2, drawn 10/26/10

I did this a few days ago and didn’t bother to put it up until today. I think this one is the best so far – I keep stretching everything out heightwise in all of these drawings though! Wario’s face is way stouter than this on the actual WL2 cover. I’m making progress though.

It’s tougher to get motivated right after midterms went really well and there’s still a long time until Thanksgiving break. Hopefully, though, this weekend will include a lot of progress on whatever it is I feel I need to make progress on, because most of my roommates are going the Rally to Restore Sanity in Washington DC (I registered for the bus too late!) So I’ll be chilling out here, being compulsively productive as usual. I saw Obama on the Daily Show the other night, by the way – it was crazy go nuts. I had no idea what to expect, and it ended up being a lot of Obama defending himself rather pointedly. He’s scary, man. Such a powerful speaker.

Also, I’m listening to Tobacco as we speak (as I type) – Fucked Up Friends. It’s a pretty cool electronic instrumental album with a lot of crazy synth action in it. Synth action is one of the best kinds of action. I don’t know any other Tobacco, but this album is super cool, so maybe you might possibly check it out, maybe.

I have made a vow to myself that I will eventually complete Ikaruga, but that game is ridiculously hard…like stupidly hard. I usually get halfway through the final chapter and then eat it on the part with the two trails that keep following you in circles. I’ve made it to the very last surivial stage about three times ever, and sometimes have no hope that I’ll ever actually finish. Eric has promised me Dibs (those little spherical treat things) if I ever do, so that’s something to work for, I suppose.

I’m at the stage of the game’s design now at which the core engine functionality is (arguably) complete, and the big deal now is designing and drawing all of the enemies and stages – adding them to the existing engine is the easy part. I’m sort of hitting a wall with that, but it’ll come to me. I’m experimenting with different ways to get a classic old-school game look out of the Gimp, with moderate success (snap to grid and a really big brush size, if you’re wondering). Right now, the main thing this project is lacking is a fun factor. I think once it becomes difficult, it’ll add a lot of playability, ironically.

I wish I’d had a room this cool growing up.

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A Drawing I Drew

Posted on 25th October 2010 in Something Daily

There is a lot of stuff that I want to learn. Like being awesome at programming. Also, like making really cool music. And, as I discovered recently, drawing. Maybe it’s just a today thing, but I suddenly have this urge to learn to cartoon. It’s like I have a general idea in my head of things that it would be really cool for me to draw, but I don’t know how (or haven’t tried enough) to actually do them. But today I have a huge urge to draw. I don’t know why. But a few minutes ago I drew this picture of Mario’s face from the cover of SMB3 – it’s freehand, just from a picture of the cover I was looking at on the computer. I think it looks good. It just occurred to me, I don’t know why I drew this on graph paper. It wasn’t really helpful at all.

A decently sweet drawing of Mario

Super Mario Bros. 3, drawn 10/25/10

Ok also, while we’re on the subject of Mario, I just got 120 stars in Super Mario Galaxy 2, so I’m all “where’s my sweet prize?”, right? And then apparently you have to finish Bowser again and then play the entire game again with Luigi to actually finish. That is some B.S., for real. It would be a lot cooler if there were more levels, but instead they want you to play the whole game twice just to get to the bonus level at the end of the game. I mean, chances are I’ll do it eventually, because that’s the kind of gamer I am, but I’m pretty angry at this game right now. I mean who does this? I’ll tell you who: Nintendo does this, apparently. Yeah, I know, I was surprised too.

I’ve been playing around with every method I can think of to get the Gimp to increase the size of its 1-pixel pencil brush. Not like how you can just scale up the brush size, I actually want to draw single pixels that are really big…imagine it’s a slice of graph paper, and you can only have one color per little box – but the boxes can be whatever size. Like that. It’s really hard to get Gimp to do this, at least for me right now. That’s my headache for today. I think I’m going to go play some Super Mario Galaxy…2.

Oh yeah! Also, go listen to the album “Either/Or” by Elliot Smith. I like it, you just might too.

Today’s addition to the list: Paul Robertson, whose art inspired me to draw today (Links are NSFW)

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