Ye Irish facepalm

St. Patrick's Day ended, and I was unable to make the last image for my St. Patrick's avatar. My schedule, my sleep debt, my phone, and certain callers all got together and "decided" to make this impossible.

St. Patrick's day avatars

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Usually, this kind of joke would be explained by me saving over an old file, but that's not the case.

How I started reading webcomics

Yes, that's supposed to be me at that age.
Wasn't I cute?
No?
Okay, I suck at drawing children.

In About my display picture, I noted that I started reading webcomics in 2008. Those of you who read webcomics or know me from commenting on them are probably wondering how I could have lived before discovering them. Those of you who don't, are probably wondering how I got sucked into such a big and convoluted world.

To answer these questions we must go way, way back; back to when I was 10 years old.

Happy St. Patrick's day

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Today, I'm commemorating St. Patrick's day with a strip from Tracy Butler's excellent comic Lackadaisy.

Modification to legal info

Just a brief note to say I modified the Privacy Policy and other legal info page.

Condolences

The earthquake caused an
explosion at an oil
refinery in the outskirts
of Tokyo. Photo by Craford
for Wikinews.

I just found out about the disaster in Japan, and would like to express my condolences to those there, or who know people there.

I don't have anything prepared for this (how could anyone anticipate this?) I feel stupid now for having invested so much effort on dedicating the day to something that happened nearly a decade ago.

In Memoriam

A los hombres y mujeres caídos en sus trabajos aquel jueves, siete años atrás.
(To the men and women lost at their jobs on that fateful Thursday, seven years ago).

Now we have Ads

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The Leibovitz photos

Leibovitz sits in front of one of
her most famous creations

Annie Leibovitz made headlines last Friday with her awesome series of photographs of famous Disney films with live actors and actresses.

Leibovitz has been in the "too awesome for words" photography business since she got her degree in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969, and had already done a series of photographs in 2007 as part of the extended celebration of Disneyland's 50^th anniversary called "Year of a Million Dreams"*. So, the photos are basically really expensive advertisements that we've already seen before

This begs the question, why is this news?

Containing Awesomeness

The last line of my post from yesterday, states that you can't contain awesomeness. After a good night's sleep, this was the first image that the phrase brought to mind:

"Ha, ha. Very funny. And the meaning is…?"
Good question. If Bolt = awesomeness (which he indisputably does) I guess it means that you can contain awesomeness; it's just that, it will find a way out into the world anyway… somehow… even if it is by chance.

The Legend of Zelda: 25 years pushing the envelope

Detail of Ag+'s tribute to Zelda's 25^th
anniversary, drawn on the day of
the anniversary.
Full image | Making-of video.
(More information below.)

This is not the typical “Oh, I wish I could draw like that” post. Sure, Ag+’s work is too awesome for words and sure, I probably wouldn’t be able to draw like that (even if I had all the fancy tools ’e did), but the main body of this post will be dedicated to The Legend of Zelda; the reason why he did such a prodigious piece.
"What? But this is not a gaming blog!"
But that doesn't take away the merits of the series, nor of researching its history, so hush.

Origins

In 1983, Nintendo put all its cards on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES); confident that, if things didn’t go well, they could always sell it in the U.S. After all, Americans will buy anything, right?

Nineteen Eighty-Four saw the Great Video Game Crash. Americans had suddenly decided that all home consoles were equally bad. Plus, Apple was releasing its Macintosh that year: an affordable computer that was an actual computer –not a dial-up terminal– which you could actually use to make things; a computer where the floppy drive was not a separate box! If you could have that, why waste money on a limmited machine that could only run half a dozen games? The fact that American video-game companies were full of litigation costs to the can’t-afford-making-anything-new level, didn’t help matters (after all, Americans will also sue over any little thing).

So how does a big, video-game giant like Nintendo deal with a crisis like this?