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A birthday approaches - The Twenty Fours

OBLIGATORY BIRTHDAY POST APPROACHING. Today I turned one year older, a whole double dozen of 24 years old! But boy, the Twenty Threes were really good. Taking a quick look at Daytum, some awesome things that happened at 23 include:

• Boxing lessons (well, three)
• Visiting Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch
• Guest-spotting on Area TV's show CO-OP a few times
• Becoming the proud owner of three new consoles (DS Lite, iPod Touch, and PS3)
• Meeting (and hugging) Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi
• Moving into a full house with four (soon to be five) guys
• Eating (for the first time): Raw beef, chicken feet, pork belly, bone marrow, and quail eggs

Neat! So what do this year's birthday celebrations entail? Last night a hefty set of friends met me for pre-birthday dinner at Suppenküche, where we inhaled german food and tasty chocolate cake. Today I went to awesome-fun-birthday-lunch at Hotel Utah with the Six Apart crowd and got my bonafide birthday chili dog. At this point, what else could I ask for?

Thanks to everyone for the birthday shout-outs via text message, Facebook, twitter, etc.! Harts, and here's to hoping another good year in my mid-twenties is on its way!

photo via toffuti break

This weekend's drawings

Holy crap it's been way too long since I've drawn enough to make one of these posts. Last week was loaded with stress bombs, so I took advantage of the weekend to sit in the sun, draw, and watch lots and lots of Mad Men. One could argue that I'm not going anywhere new with these puppies (and I should really start to push myself to color them), but after two or three months of not drawing I'm just getting my groove back, so to speak.

Shout-out to Mr. Andreas Schuster and Jacob Ferguson (who's painting I purchased a week ago) for the recent jolt of inspriation!

Happy Friday - I'm not dead, I swear.

Hey buddies, just wanted to chime in this week and report that I am *not* dead with swine flu, rolly polly puppy flu, or astronauts fighting mummies fighting yetis flu. I did manage to catch something nasty from the 60,000-some nerds attending PAX last weekend, but at this point I'm about 100% recovered and will be back on my feet and reporting to the interwebs as normal by Monday. Huzzah!

In the meantime, I have just a few photos up on my flickr from PAX 2009, which was a ton of fun as usual. To sum things up, it was a pleasure to see all of my buddies from The Behemoth, Harmonix, CO-OP, and Destructoid at their finest, plus I got to spend a lot of quality time with Brother Chow. Ron Gilbert's keynote was one of the best videogame speeches I've seen in ages, and CO-OP's panel from the future was a lot of fun to sit in on.

Cheers to everyone I had a chance to meet, and a happy Friday to everyone else! Here's your fancy Friday song, "Molybdan" by Justus Köhnckhe:

02 Molybdan

PAX 2009 - Here we go!

After a few more work meetings with puppies named Ophelia, I'll be zipping off to SFO with Brother Chow (aka .Harr) and flying over to Seattle for PAX 2009! Please interpret the above video as a visual embodiment of my excitement and karate-fueled-joy.

PAX (aka Penny Arcade Expo) has been one of the most memorable and fun conventions I've attended in the past. Here are some of the panels I'm looking forward too:

    FRIDAY

• [ 11:30 - 12:30 ] Post-N'Gai, Post-EGM Video Game Journalism, or Where Do We Go Now
• [ 12:00 - 1:00 ] Hey Ash, Whatcha Filmin: How to make a moderately successful viral video series that confuses the hell out of people.
• [ 1:00 - 2:00 ] PAX 2009 Keynote Ron Gilbert (!!!)
• [ 1:00 - 2:30 ] Mega64 Panel
• [ 2:30 - 3:30 ] How do we make online gaming communities suck less?
• [ 5:30 - 6:30 ] Live Taping of CO-OP at PAX!

    SATURDAY

• [1:00 - 2:00 ] Medium is the: Story Matters

...and more! I will be returning home to San Francisco on Sunday morning, but who else is going? Any other suggested panels?

If you're going, see you there! (Oh, and thanks Bill for the sweet vids!)

Visualization of online personas by Aaron Zinman

Aaron Zinman's Personas creates an animated visualization of your online persona, creating in an interesting color-coded DNA strip of traits and topics that associate with your name across the Internet. Part of MIT's  Metropath(ologies) exhibit, the engine "...uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity."

Entering "Tiff Chow" results in a decent summary of what I'd imagine my online persona to be, but "Tiffany Chow" generated a much more edcuated and medicaly oriented persona given my talented Chow doppelgängers out there. That said, apparently the engine creates different results every time, and if you share a name of many on the web you'll get to see "alternate lives flash before you", as @doorknobdude put it. Reardless it's still a pretty neat visualization, though I wish they wouldn't cateorize the tag "game" as a sports-affiliated topic. I'm no jock, Spock. 

via mbf tod@ay

Vacation, All I've Ever Wanted

Holy pizza on pizza Batman, I'm going on vacation! I'm off to two full weeks of doing a lot of nothing, and some other things, but mostly nothing. Chances are I'll be online from time to time, and you might catch me on the CO-OP side of things in a few weeks, but I'll be MIA for the most part.

Farewell, have a great July, and here's a song to remember me by (or hate me for, since it will never leave your Pizza-head):

Das Racist - Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell

this week's drawings (and some of last week's)

I think switching between different kinds of sketchbooks helps keep my drawing habit alive and kicking. It was convenient to travel and draw in New York with my blue mini-moleskine, but now I've switched tracks to a storyboard moleskine my friend Danielle gave to me last summer.

Each page has conveniently outlined, round-cornered squares that make for great little drawing frames. I feel as though I have greater comfort working within confined drawing spaces, but I think the next shift should be an attempt at drawings of a larger scale (quite possibly, on my bedroom wall). Anyway, this week features a selection of ghosts, movie quotes, and the results of having withdrawl symptoms after visiting the Big City.

this week's drawings

 Since I've been on vacation in NYC for the past week or so, I've been doing my best to get plenty of my favorite non work activities in my schedule. This means seeing friends, wandering around one of my favorite cities, and getting lots and lots of sleep. Of course I've managed to get a few drawings in while I've been lounging around, many inspired by various events during my trip.

This time instead of scanning them in on the B&W copier at the office, I took photos of them with my new camera to maintain the color of the moleskin paper. What do you think? Should I stick to the grayscale copies or the more realistic photographs?

Baby it's cold outside

After surging around in Brooklyn all afternoon fighting a wind that was as hungry as the wolf, I can fairly say that baby, it's cold outside. My first few days in the big city have been filled with feminist art exhibits, first snows, and reconnections with old friends. The most notable activity of course was the chiptunes festival, Blipfest, but I'll get into that little gem in another post.

Meanwhile, if you're tucked inside from the cold for a cozy Sunday evening, I'd check out some of my favorite old time spooky cartoons. It'll warm you right up, or at least give you the heebie jeebies enough to dance around in a ghostly fashion.

way too much NXE

NXE (aka New Xbox Experience) was released on Xbox 360 a couple of weeks ago, and since I've been more knee-deep in this console than I have been in a while. On my first weekend I casually indulged in some total anti-social activity by watching both seasons of 30 Rock using the Netflix instant play. That was pretty hardcore. Then I started my Thanksgiving holiday by playing hours of Valve's new zombie multi-player game Left 4 Dead with the brother, which is pure fun. Oh yeah, and my avatar is adorable.com, isn't she?

The combination of the show marathon and the game, however, lead me to overlap a suspiciously similar character. The random character picker in L4D would always assign me Louis, the somewhat dorky IT guy in a white button-up shirt. I've since reserved him as my gunman of choice when playing, quite possibly because he reminds me a whole lot of the writer Toofer from 30 Rock, both visually and vocally. Am I the only one who thinks so?