the quickest way to lose all your friends part 7: near the end of summer edition

My rate of these has gone down lately (I got a job and I have a bit less free time) and this will probably be the last post of this sort this summer which puts the final number of drawings down to just about 40 people. Which is pretty good considering my first post came from an outside request and the rest were just from a flood of comments after I mentioned "if you ask, I'll draw you". While I have skipped a few people, mainly those I haven't really seen since Middle School or something, the majority of the requests up until July have been granted. Here's the latest batch of drawings below.

Marissa suggested a photo including her boyfriend Josh in it as well. She was among one of the many people I met more than two years ago on AIM before ever stepping foot into Pratt and she was one of the few people I already knew that were on the Healthy Choices floor foundation year. She does a lot of paintings and is a Painting major I believe. She also has a couple of tattoos, it could be more but I know she has a Peace symbol on her back and her last name on her hip.

I know Josh really well too, since he's a 3D Animation major in my year and there are only about 20 or so undergrads in my class, I pretty much had every major class with him last year including Intro to Modeling, Rigging and Editing class, I think that was all of them, there could be more, I'm not too sure. I really found his advanced Alien facial rig to be pretty rad, he was great at modeling in Maya too.

Devin and Collin were my roommates last year and were pretty much in all my foundation classes. This strip is a reference to the one time we decided to eat in the separate "dining" area of a local sketchy take-out Chinese restaurant. While the food was the same as their take-out, the prices were about 1.5 times higher than they normally would be and generally the place felt like it was about to fall apart. We did however, enjoy the large fish they had in the place though, its just not worth the price of admission to see them again.

Most of my memories with Devin and Collin came from LCD, 3D design and Drawing class foundation year. Each of those classes lasted about 6 hours long and met over 30 sessions. The most horrifying of the bunch had to be Drawing class which had to be one of the most exhausting classes I've ever taken, the professor came off as a bit strict at first too, but that was mostly because she cared so much about what she was doing. It was great fuel for conversation however and also a great excuse to let off steam playing a lot of Smash Bros. during the 2 hour lunch break between two 3 hour chunks of each class.

Jason is an industrial design major and a friend of Collin's, he used to have a mohawk when I first met him Freshman year and I kind of wish he kept it. Regardless, he was in a fairly cool pixelation video that he made for Beth Warshafsky's 4D design class in like 20 minutes. We weren't in the same class together but we had the same teacher.

Ed Waters has really awesome side burns, I really hope he doesn't shave them off. He's great at Smash Bros. too and is a pretty vocal Nintendo fanboy.

One of the More Decent Shows on Earth

Lately, I’ve been winning a lot of small things off of Twitter. Starting from the most minor stuff, I got some custom stickers from a graphic designer I was following, followed by three Rock Band songs from Pepsi, a free KFC meal from Oprah an advance copy of Muramasa: The Demon Blade for Wii from Ignition Entertainment and lastly four free tickets to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus.

While I don’t consider myself an incredibly lucky person, I feel like all the recent Twitter winnings are more a result from corporations not really understanding the “actual” size of social network websites and trying to bank on the so-called popularity based on all the media hype. While it’s true there are 12 million accounts on Twitter, only five percent of them have over 100 messages written while all the rest are just fairly dead. I’m pretty sure I was only among a handful of people who entered the majority of the given contests.

Which leads me in to this blog post, when I won a set of four forty dollar tickets to the Circus at Coney Island. After writing a fairly negative post on Coney Island, I was auto-followed by their respective Twitter account, I followed back figuring it could help me figure out some cheap-ish things to do on one of those many lazy Sundays. One post in particular, directed me to the “ Be a Circus Supermom” contest; it entailed retweeting a post on the account and then sending them an e-mail with your Twitter username. I half sarcastically entered, only to receive notification that I won tickets a couple of days later.

After gathering together a few friends (all of whom have been drawn on this blog at one point or another) who could make it to Coney Island on a few days notice and working around my work schedule (I wouldn’t really want to bring my laptop to the circus) I was ready to go with my expectations set fairly low for the place. The initial e-mail suggested coming in a bit early to get the tickets from the booth, which was an ample excuse to hang out and to check out the cold dead corpse of what used to be the amusement capital of New York City (there’s a billboard for the dumpy Playland amusement part right by Nathan’s now, for god’s sake).

While it’s unfortunate that Astro Land is no longer the centerpiece of Coney Island, a lot of the carnival themed businesses that surrounded the location still remain in tact. Including picking up. Also, I was surprised to see that many of the rides at Astro Land are still running after being rented out by independent vendors, while I know it will inevitably be taken down, its still comforting in a way as if the apocalypse has been delayed by a couple of years or so despite the entire sleazy post-apocalyptic vibe that Coney Island has ALWAYS had.

So I ate a Corn Dog at Nathan’s and got some Banana soft serve Ice Cream over at the neighboring Denny’s Delight and then went over to the ticket booth. Getting the tickets was fairly painless after a quick flash of my Driver’s license. We arrived a couple of minutes late to the actual 7 o’clock showing but they seemed to keep the opening pretty low key, mostly of a clown whistling and amping up the audience.

Granted, most of the circus came off as pretty low-key, this is the second circus I’ve seen, and it could have easily been just the novelty of seeing it the first time when I was six or something but I found the experience just a bit underhwhelming.

Most of the acrobatics while very impressive where spread out pretty thinly among some underwhelming comedy bits and a few shows that were just completely unimpressive; mainly a troupe of trained dachshunds that could jump over six inch bridges, I’ve seen more impressive stunts at dog shows on Animal Planet. Luckily, all the cool stuff is in the YouTube trailer, including some things, such as Zebras that never actually made it into the show.

My other issue with the circus, was that the entire performance seemed biased towards the center while the left and right sides got the bum-end (literally) of the spectacle. Mainly, then they had a group of trained elephants form a congo line of sorts, they did this trick twice and both of the times I had nothing to really look at besides a few elephant asses forming a pose that may look a bit objectionable in an Animal Planet sense of the word.

My entire disappointment could be more a result of a lack of revenue for the circus, greatly crippling the gimmicky thrills of “The Greatest Show on Earth”, the entire tent was less than a quarter full and the ticket booth seemed relatively vacant thirty minutes before the performance. This could be either a sign of a recession or more a sign of the times, where greater spectacle can be viewed on the internet for free at your own convenience.


Don’t get me wrong, I plenty enjoyed some of the more low-grade thrills such as a man on a foot-long bike run it through a flaming hoop, and I thought the bit with the White Tigers was quite novel but I can’t say had I paid the forty dollars that I would have walked out satisfied and considering the fact that the entire circus thing is dying down, its probably a good idea to take a small child to it because I can’t really imagine the type of entertainment lasting that many more years.

Still, I greatly appreciated the free tickets that they hooked me up with and it made for a great night with my friends, just, if given the choice, I’d probably have more fun spending a few nights at the movies with the figurative amount of money.

Also, I’m working on another Facebook friend post, with ten days until I’m back at Pratt, time is starting to run a bit fast now.

The Lion King of Steaks

I’ve been slacking on the Facebook friend pictures at the moment, I did one or two more since the last update but I’d rather post them in a batch of five or so than dedicate a post to each drawing individually. Even though its only a few days a week, the Onion has been taking a bit out of me between the train going into New York City and all but apart from that, I’m loving the work they have for me. I was able to get my background used on their Twitter page, so I’m already pretty satisfied, plus the guys I’m working for are all incredibly nice, and I’m not just saying it, I am surprised at just how friendly they come off as. Anyway, here’s a slightly less exciting life related blog post…

When it comes to Broadway, most of my experiences were with the more satirical plays. When it wasn’t rehashing quotes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Spam-a-lot consisted of a lot of jabs at traditional Andrew Lloyd Weber, likewise while Avenue Q was not directly a satire, it was definitely a send-up of the coming of age story that often plagues the theater. Now, that I think of it, the only real traditional one I saw was Spring Awakening during Pratt’s 2007 orientation and I have a strong feeling that it was one of those love-it or hate-it kind of things (with my feelings leaning more towards the latter than the former).

So when my Pratt friend April wanted to watch The Lion King on Broadway, I was definitely excited due to the fact that I’ve been watching that DivX file of the Disney film on my Desktop for quite a few months (If that thing wasn’t in the wretched Disney Vault for so long, I’d probably even have the DVD of it) but I didn’t feel like it could outdo the film, not at all, especially given all the limitations of the Broadway format. Looking back however, I feel like the limitations were what made the Broadway adaptation so successful, they had to compensate with extra creative muscle, but I’ll get more into that later.

I got the tickets for the thing about a month and a half in advance and decided to come in at around 1 PM or so to have some time to hang out before the 8 PM show. This involved a run over to some of my favorite places, including familiar spots like Forbidden Planet and what would have been the Virgin Megastore (totally closed down), followed by some Bubble Tea at Saint Alp’s by Astor Place and then a stroll through the delightfully bizarre but all too brief Toy Tokyo.


On the way there, I passed by 99 Miles to Philly, which was a restaurant I’ve always wanted to visit ever since I read a post about it on Philly based animator Bryan Brinkman’s Twitter. Consequently, I wound up eating there for lunch and I can safely say that my “Steak wit Wiz” was definitely on par with the sandwich I’ve had in Philly and it was miles ahead of my own cheese steaks I’d make at home. I think I’ll heat up the cheese whiz a bit more and get even thinner steaks for my consequent attempts. The place was a good deal though, for ten bucks they gave you a sickly foot long greasy cheese steak with some waffle fries and a coke, for a non-chain in New York City, this is a pretty good deal.

Factor in some hanging out in Times Square and a relatively fancy pizza place and it was time for the 8 o’clock showing of Lion King. My initial impressions of the theater were incredibly favorable. They had some of the fancy African wood costumes behind the glass and a few fairly extensive gift shops throughout. Seeing all the merchandise, I should have been disgusted but for some reason I was impressed by the amount of detail and attention they put towards the effort, I could totally understand how the show had legs on Las Vegas whereas efforts like Avenue Q could only strive in New York City.

Our cheaper $60 tickets were literally against the wall in the highest mezzanine so we got a pretty decent view of the crowd going there. I was surprised that only about half the crowd consisted of families, while the rest were just Average Joes and middle-aged tourists going in to take a show. This could be because I was seeing it on a Thursday night and that is less than ideal for most families, especially ones with young children to see it, but I’d like to tell myself its because The Lion King is as synonymous with Broadway as Phantom of the Opera.


Watching Lion King on Broadway was an incredibly nostalgic experience for me, often I’d get chills down my spine, not too different from the chills I got when I first saw WALL-E, from something being so perfect its depressing and from it hitting an emotional chord with me. Especially when this was paired with a room full of people cheering and clapping incredibly loudly at every joke, punch line and dance sequence. Its weird, it was almost comforting to be around so many people that were that taken into the show.

While I’m pretty sure much of the praise for the show has already been said and much better than I possibly could write about it over the past 11 years of its run, I was completely taken away from the imagery, especially the dancers which would represent things as direct as giraffes and elephants, all the way to the more abstract such as blades of grass. The show kept things classy, even by Disney standards and the African art direction never came off as forced as it seemed in the commercials for the play. A lot of the more difficult sequences were pulled off in silhouette or with shadow puppets, while some of the characters were controlled by Avenue Q style puppetry with other objects being portrayed with kites and streamers, further making the play feel like some weird African themed Kabuki theater of sorts.

I was particularly impressed with the set for the show, which was rigged full of steam powered jets and was fully movable with trap doors and a lot of the pieces being on wheels. Absolutely every scene from the Disney movie was pulled off on the set, from the stampede all the way over to the climatic fight sequence off the cliff of Pride Rock. It was all a visual overload of sorts and I feel it goes without saying that the music was incredibly strong as well, like even topping the phenomenal score from Elton John and Hans Zimmer for the feature film.

When it ended the entire packed theater gave the thing a standing ovation, which is something I’ve never seen for a Broadway play. My only real complaint with the thing was that I haven’t seen it earlier, particularly when the thing was new to Broadway. Had I known I’d like the thing this much, I would have put the thing a lot higher on my priorities list.

…and no, I have not sold out to the Disney corporation…but I totally would...

the quickest way to lose all your friends part 6: creepy animé fetish edition

I thought it was impossible but I've almost caught up with every request I've had on my Facebook album for a drawing. While I have skipped a couple of people, namely the ones that I've never seen since Middle School, I've gotten most of them in and all of the ones in the massive avalanche of comments during the first day I've uploaded it. Here are the next batch of five...

While I've already covered Adam Dreifus earlier, Nikki wanted a drawing but is one of the few college aged students I know without a Facebook account, she also wants to stay relatively anonymous on the internet. Nikki was in practically all my foundation classes in Freshmen year and I virtually hung out with her every day to do homework after that. There was a bit less hanging out in sophomore year, but I've still played 8 hour marathons of Rock Band on occasion and ate an incredibly suspicious looking bacon wrapped torpedo meat product with her when her roommate made it. Nikki is into science, grammar and anatomy too and is an avid comic buff, the comic above is a reference to her creepy obsession with eroguro art. Eroguro stuff is pretty disgusting, I wouldn't recommend doing a Google search for it...

Frances was also in all my foundation classes. One of her movies that she made in her 4D class involved me as a street thug robbing a girl on the street, only to get tackled by a cop. It was possibly the greatest film of all time and it had a huge response in class, if you've been reading this blog for ahwhile, the chances are you've seen it.

James is a painting major at Pratt and was one of my classmates in Animation 101 class and was a fan of Robo-Nader since the first time I mentioned the idea passing him. He does some pretty cool experimental stuff, I wish he had an account on Vimeo or something so I could link you guys to his work, I went to the opening for his paintings at Pratt as well, its all VERY cool.

Ben has a cool last name that rhymes with Ravioli, so that makes him a pretty cool cat in my book. He also knows Griffin Newman a funny guy I met during a summer animation program at Tisch, its weird in a 6 degrees of separation kind of way...

And last but not least, here's Marc Freundlich, he sat at my lunch table in high school every day and would often be the one commandeering the mini-Chess in a Tin matches going on. We'd also play cards occasionally, that is, before the school ruled "card games" as "gambling" and practically outlawed every game of "BS" we'd play...'tis a shame. More recently, Marc went with me to the screenings of Tokyo Gore Police and Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl over the past couple of years, he's obsessed with the New York Asian Film Festival and plans on volunteering at the festival next year so he could get into all fifty of their movies for free.