This is how internet pop culture popularity works. I call it the Asteroids Timeline of Pop Culture Icon Popularity on the Internet, or The internet is full of idiots for short.

To understand this timeline, you need to remember Asteroids. Here’s a pretty good mock up I threw together.

You’re a little spaceship that blows up asteroids. At the end of the game it turns out your dad was actually the monster, your retard jock friend nails the goth chick, and you are a dream of yourself.

Now here’s where we bring some simple geometry into it. The spaceship represents the pop culture icon. The Y axis of the screen represents coolness. The X axis doesn’t mean shit. In this screen we have Chuck at an all time low.

Now here is where it gets interesting. The game environment of Asteroids exists within a finite yet infinite spherical galaxy. You can travel from point A in direction X forever. You will never hit a wall. However, you pass through the point at which you departed after some time. It is as if a 3 dimensional universe existed on the surface of a sphere.

Chuck passes through the lowest possible point in popularity you can get to while still being remembered at all.

Amazingly he appears at the top of the screen. He has become so lame that he is now awesome again… to idiots.

This theory of mine isn’t the only possibility. This could be an example of The Pop Culture Icon Popularity Super Mario Bros Death. I won’t bother making screens for this because I’m tired. In this theory, Chuck falls into a hole of lameness. Instead of disappearing forever, he launches far into the air (again, y axis equals popularity). Instead of remaining popular, though, he quickly rockets back into lameness and disappears. Game over.

View this clip on Vimeo

View this clip on Vimeo

Adam and I talked about doing video blogs back when Jakob was just doing them on Blumpy. Now that he’s got this big fuckoff website for this sort of thing, why not give it a shot? The answer: see video above.

I kid. This turned out better than I thought it would. Also the 3D piece in the middle is Josh Burton’s “The Potter”. There should be a link to him on the right. I don’t think he links me back. Internet glare. Anyway, Josh knows I think his piece is a technically fantasictic work of beauty and animation… but it has that scene. SCAD’s playing it on constant rotation in the lobby of the animation building. I guess the tape for Email!! wore out… :\

It seems my drawing of a naked satan character I never did anything with has spread around the net a little. That’s cool, but some jerks don’t seem to understand that hotlinking directly to the image is rude. That takes my bandwidth. I pay for that. Ok well other people paid for it because they loved the Email cartoon, but unless I make another ultra-popular cartoon I will pay for that next year. Go use imageshack or photobucket. It’s free, fast, and easy.

I could just set it up in my htaccess file to block that sort of behavior, but changing the stolen picture from a cute devil to a photo of old man gay porn is funnier.

Every single Thursday night before I go to bed I forget that every single Friday morning the apartment complex hires groundskeepers to wake me up with leaf blowers. It’s goddamn January. What the fuck are you blowing around? How much spanish moss and pine needles accumulate that this has to be a weekly thing?

Jeez. I have nothing of much importance to say, but I’m free entertainment for some people… diddle that daddle.

The picture I posted yesterday is an early frame from a sequence from the third cartoon of the “Email!!” series. I suppose I should name the series at some point, since the other two have nothin at all to do with computers or email. I finished inking that sequence that night, and this morning I threw down tones with art markers. It looks nice on paper. I’m not sure how bad the “breathing” is going to be when it’s moving. My gut tells me it’ll be fine.
The second cartoon, currently going under the name “Dinosaurs in the Bible” in French, is not finished. I have to record final audio, do an edit, and lip sync it. My production pipeline was more traditional for this piece, and I think it killed my momentum.

The third cartoon hasn’t been named yet. It isn’t based on any comic I’ve drawn, and I’m honestly making it up as I animate. I’m jacking a bunch of short ideas for cartoons from my sketchbook and ramming them into one hyper cartoon. I believe it will be funny even if the format turns out to be bewildering. I really need to come up with a structure soon so I don’t animate too much material.
I haven’t posted much about my personal life because I just haven’t been in much of an open book mood. Things aren’t bad. Things aren’t great. I’m alive. I’m healthy. I have an itchy beard.