Parade of Unfortunate Star Wars Costumes

This is what happens when people who dress up as Star Wars characters make fun of other people who dress up as Star Wars characters.

Stump the Vader

http://www.sithsense.com/flash.htm
A pretty cool flash diversion for Burger King. Pay attention to the ending. As Darth gets closer to the answer, weird things start to happen. This one is made by the same people who brought you:

http://www.subservientchicken.com/
which is equally funny if you haven’t seen it yet.

Copycat Advertising

Coloribus AdMirror
Here is a site that is similiar to a favorite site of mine called Pirate Sites which catalogs whole websites that spring up on the net that directly copy and steal the intellectual property of another (more popular) website.

This other AdMirror site does the same thing except for the fact that it is about print advertising that rips off the idea in general and sometimes completely mimics the same photography. Most of the time, it is not the exact same like Pirated Sites quite often finds but it goes to show how little imagination and creativity some ad execs and website designers really have.

"I feel GREAT!"

Nutri Grain- I Feel Great Ad
I haven't seen this one on the air yet and I assume that I won't. It is far too weird and funny to make it onto the air.

Guess The Google

This is an addictive flash-based game. I played it for about an hour. It is pretty hard but basically it shows several photos that it gathers from google on a particular search term and then based upon the pictures you see, you have to guess what word it searched for.

Bid on Life-Size X-Wing

Hurry. This full-size replica of an X-Wing from Star Wars offer won't last long. 9 of them were originally made for Lucasfilm as promotion pieces. Actually, I have seen this thing first-hand. In the description it mentions that it was hanging in a FAO Schwartz in Orlando, FL. I went to that store about 4 years ago. It is pretty impressive. It comes with Luke and R2-D2 as well.

MX vs. ATV is out for Xbox

Now both the Xbox and PS2 versions of my first game that I worked on is out on the shelves of stores. The TV commercials are now airing quite a bit. So, I am beginning to put together an order for my friends and family. I can get copies of the game at cost, so let me know if you are interested.

My name is in the credits under the title of "Additional Artists" or something like that since I only helped out during the last few months of development. The names of the racers that you race against in the game are random and are picked from a list of professional riders and employees of Rainbow Studios who worked on the game. So, likely, the only indication that you will have that I worked on it will be something like this:

Gamespot Screenshot of the Xbox version

I mostly built out pages and made them work. So, about 90% of what I did is behind the scenes and you actually can't see it. I was more of a production guy on this one. Not much creativity involved. The only things, I did that you can see are that I edited, airbrushed, and prepared all of the professional rider photos and the logos of all of the sponsors of the game.

My New Room w/ a View

We switched up the offices here at Rainbow a bit. The new expansion got done, so my game team moved and then that made everyone else in the studio move as well. So, the UI Artists all moved to a new bigger room. Luckily, we moved into what many have agreed is the nicest office on the entire floor.

Before, we had a corner office with tile flooring and many windows. However, those windows overlooked the parking lot of the hotel that is next door. It wasn't a very exciting view and the sun came directly in the windows, so we had to shut the blinds most of the time.

The new office is also a corner office, twice as large, has carpet, and has a stunning view of 3 of the mountains here in Downtown Phoenix. We have the same view as the fanciest and most expensive hotels in Phoenix. We can keep the blinds up all of the time, and it is really nice to look over my monitor and see everything. It seems like a small thing but it really makes work seem a lot cheerier.

Devon's (Evil or Good) Twin?

I was attending a poker tournament that some of the people from Rainbow hold every two weeks. So, most of the other players were fellow employees. Although, some people brought their wives, friends, freind's wives, etc. It was a fun and fairly typical tournament. The interesting part of the evening was that I swear I met Devon Moore's brunette twin.

She is the wife of one of my coworkers and she looks like she could easily be Devon's sister. On top of that, she acted exactly like Devon. The more I talked to her, the more striking the resemblance in personality, voice, etc. So, once I came to grips with the fact that this was Devon's doppelganger, I wasn't sure which one might be the evil one. The brunette version seemed fairly nice but the one with the darker hair is usually the evil one, right?

(For those of you who don't know Devon Moore, she is old friend and former co-worker of mine at Red Five)

Car Window Tinting

I recently had the windows in my car tinted because I have a black interior in my Eclipse and the windows are pretty big. So, it was either sell the car, or get the windows tinted as dark as they can go. So, I opted for the most expensive and darkest option that I could. I had the local Mitsu dealer down here do it. They did a great job.

At first, the plastic was full of bubbles and I thought about complaining. But they did say that it needs 3-5 days to adhere completely. So, I waited and the bubbles magically went away. It looks really professional and looks like the car came that way. It actually looks like they removed the windows in order to do it.

So, my car looks really mean now with all of the windows dark. You absolutely cannot see in the back. You can hold a bright pink card to the window and you can't see it all from the outside. The trouble is seeing out at night. It is so dark that my rear window is now useless at night.

PSPWare to Sync PSP with Mac - Windows Coming Soon

PSPWare by Null River
This software looks really cool. It auto converts movies, photos, syncs iTunes playlists over to the PSP, and backs up your game saves. There is only the Macintosh version out now but the Windows version is coming soon.

2 Most Amazing Optical Illusions I Have Ever Seen

Motion Blindness
This little Flash based demo shows the properties of an illusion called Motion Blindness. What is amazing is how quickly it works. It only takes a second of looking at the green dots for the yellow dots to start disappearing.

Self-Induced Hallucination
I was amazed that this one even worked. You have all probably stared at a spinning hypnotic wheel before, right. Well this one actually does something. The difference is that you have to hold your breath which helps deprive you of oxygen. (Probably not a good idea but won't cause permanent damage) I tried the .exe file. It appears to be virus free. I wish it was just a Flash file like the one above though.

Changed my cell phone #

Let me know if you need my new cell phone number. I ended up having to change it to a local Phoenix phone number. I was just having too much trouble whenever I would call local business and give them my phone number, then they would always double-check and would quite often not call me back. I also couldn't get any pizzas delivered. They need to have a phone number to call and verify and they refuse to call long-distance.