Low-bandwidth YouTube version

I recorded my trip from Utah to California taking one picture every 10-11 seconds, minus about an hour of travel before Winnamucca when I could change the battery. There are about 2970 pictures in all, played at 24 frames-per-second.

I had to turn in my sketchbook today, so I made sure to scan in some of the things I've drawn last month. I think I went to the Hogle Zoo three times last month, and those sketches turned out more interesting than the rest.

The Hogle Zoo has a great variety of animals to draw, possibly greater than the three zoos that I've been to recently in northern California combined. The Sacramento Zoo, however, still wins at having the most billions of lemurs.

This guy, however, freaks me out. See those teeth? Those sharp and pointy teeth? He sits up on this rock looking down on everyone who passes his domicile, his beady little eyes watching with the utmost disdain, patiently waiting for his chance to strike. The plaque on the wall claimed that this guy's closest relative is the elephant. This is a horrible case of misinformation, as it doesn't take a scientist to tell you that this guy's closest relative is Dracula. If there wasn't a half-inch pane of glass separating him from us, he'd surely be leaping neck-to-neck as he feeds upon the blood of the living. His name? The Hyrax. A name surely derived by the sound his victims make as he sinks his teeth into their necks.

The game graphics project is down to the last two items.

And here are the weird search engine queries from February:

• "number one thing that makes a sandwich shop fail" - It is a statistically provable fact that all failed sandwich shops did not have a ninja employed at the time of failing.

• "have you seen a ninja sandwich" - Here's a hint: if you start choking while eating a sandwich, it is possible that you are eating a "ninja sandwich." However, most sandwiches lack the physical and mental capacities, let alone a long enough lifespan, to train to be a ninja. Also, a sandwich-related death could be a result of the well-known Ninja bacteria known as "Salmonella," rather than the sandwich itself.

• "sandwich shop captain pirate" - This will also make your sandwich shop fail.

Three things remaining on the list of things to do for the game graphics project! Animating explosions is fun.

Also dealt with another minor crisis where I had to re-attach the connector jack to my laptop's power adapter. Again. I've lost track of the number of times I've had to do this now. This time, however, the cord also started breaking off from the power 'brick', so I had to break that open as well. It has a nice, shiny coat of duct-tape now.

These are some of the better sketches I did this last week. My application for the animation program is due April 1st, which is less than four weeks away.

I hope to get started up again on the next episode in April, and created a new progress bar to help me figure out how much I have left to do. There's still a lot left to do.

As for the game graphics project, last week I completed one of the five remaining chunks of work I need to do. That leaves 4 things to do. It's looking really cool so far, and I can't wait to show what to show what we've done!

As for other things, the animation portfolio deadline is coming up. Less than six weeks to go. I also saw Coraline a few weeks ago, and it was really good. There were quite a few parents who thought it would have been a good movie to take their small children to. I'll bet those children had some amazing nightmares that night.

I've had this sitting on my hard drive since December 2007. This was made for an illustration class for a story about a Mayan princess. It's theoretically unfinished, since there were supposed to be people in the background which never got put in.

It's been a while since I've listed any of the weird ones I've gotten. Here are the best for December and January:

• "Sketches of commandos"

• "ninja shirt turtle"

• "desktop background sandwich"

• About 19 different variations on "how to start a sandwich shop." I wonder why...

...and I can already tell that February is going to be an interesting month. All this, combined with the strange group of advertisers in those boxes lately, makes me think I may need to re-evaluate who I think my target audience is. Jewelry and beads? On a site about animation and ninjas? There was even an ad for some online occult surplus store a few days ago. Yes, I'm serious.

The index page redesign has been successfully switched over. There's still some re-categorizing to do, and anyone who bothered to subscribe to the old RSS may need to unsubscribe and resubscribe to the desired one. Each page generates its own RSS now, so you can keep track on as little or as much as you want. Those interested on just the basic updates related to the main content of this site will probably want to subscribe to the 'News' page, and those interested in all updates may want to check out the new blog section.

The next set of website-structure updates won't come for a while. The administration panel I use to upload stuff and manage content, pages, and other settings needs to be overhauled first (again...), and I have more important things to finish up before I take on that task.

Things have been quiet here lately. Along with school, I've still been working on the one project with an independent game developer, though it should be nearing completion soon. I've also been making significant changes to the website coding over the past six months, and I've got enough completed of the index page that I'll be able to switch that over this weekend.

Though my class schedule this semester is way less stressful than last semester, I still have to prepare for the portfolio deadline on April 1st for the animation program. If I get progress on the Sandwich Shop Ninja episode at some point, great. I have a lot of work to do, unfortunately, and it may have to wait a bit more. At the very least, I'll drop a link to the game when it's finally released.