I did have a happy birthday, and thanks to everyone who said so: Hannah, Chas, Cecilia, Lydia, Berta, Amy, Duncan, Maham, Hwaran, May, Alissa, Kali, and so on.

Here’s the required bulleted gift list (Now with 33% more commentary):

• From Parents:
  • Black sweater
  • Plum collared shirt
  • Ferruche gold t-shirt with brown trim
  • Lucky brand brown corduroys
  • Clothes are always considered a lame birthday gift, but I have to say these are pretty awesome
• From Hannah: A wonderful handmade book of photos of us. It’s super cute and because she made it late at night, super silly.
• From Amy:
  • Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots pen: This thing is way more fun than it should be
  • Modeling clay: Everyone love modeling clay
  • Journal with a big purple flower. Inside joke about our advert design class: I try to stick a flower in my projects whenever possible.
  • Assorted Candies: Mmm.
  • Rubber Ducky Soap: Is she saying I smell bad? :)
• Duncan: 3 crisp fivers. Duncan’s all about the cash monay.
• Maham: Limericks. They were too awful wonderful to reproduce here. Trust me. Bad Enlightening. I guess it’s the thought that counts :)
• Alissa: Sign. She made me a big sign that said ‘Happy Birthday Fergus!’ I felt a bit self-conscious walking around with a sign that said that, but you know, it’s cool.

Thanks again everyone!

After school Duncan and Hannah came over. We partook in delicious black bean lasanga and lemon poppyseed cake courtesy of my Mother. Delicious. Hannah and I snuggled and watched Osamu Tezuka’s Metropolis. Now I’m writing this, and going to bed contented.

I just finished a illustration of Starky, my favorite character from Squaresoft’s Chrono Cross:

Click for larger version.

This picture was done in Photoshop CS. I used this concept art of Starky as reference, although, as you can tell, I departed from the source quite a bit (He’s cuter that way). If you’re one of those high quality types, you can get a copy of the image in lossless PNG format, or if you want to see how I did everything, you can download the 1.6MB Photoshop PSD file.

I really like how this turned out. Although I originally wanted to add in his laser gun, I got lazy at the end and decided to leave him as is. I got his ’stats’ directly from the game, but I not sure I’m happy how the text layout came out.

Please leave any comments or critiques you have. This is my first time messing around with gradients in illustration, and I’d like to hear what people think about it (good or bad). Thanks, and hope you like it!

Damn good movie. I recommend it highly.
I need to see The Royal Tenenbaums again, this put me in the mood to see some more Wes Anderson stuff.

One thing I love that I’ve been seeing in movies nowdays is wonderful retro anachronism. The Life Aquatic features acoustic couplers for speakerphones, bleepy pre-techno music by Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh, and a wonderful World War II era submarine-hunter-turned-oceanographic-vessel, another favorite of mine Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events has reel-to-reel tapes in the dashboard of 40’s style cars and the count arriving in his autogyro.

The Life Aquatic sets itself in a purposefully vague time period. Team Zissou is a relic, but that’s a wonderful thing. It give us a glance into a world no more. I only wish I had Team Zissou styled adidas.