Month: October 2005

Categories
Blogging Illustration

The Adventures of Art Lad

Dragon

I’ve been trying to inspire myself to do more drawing just for the fun of it. I hardly draw at all anymore, my art is all walk cycles and run cycles in 3d on the computer. It’s fun as jobs go, don’t get me wrong, but I want to pick up a pencil (or crayon) and just draw for no other reason than the sheer enjoyment of it again.

Well I stumbled across this wonderful blog on my internet travels and was inspired. Do you remember when you were a kid and you’d just scribble away for hours totally lost in some fantastic invention of your imagination?

Categories
Personal

Where’s My Packet Of Tayto Mum?

Found this via Mighty Girl’s blog: this woman prepares lunch for her two children every day and takes a photo of it for her blog (who doesn’t?). It’s far from quail’s eggs and tori soboro that I was raised!

Categories
Illustration Photography

Dandelion



Dandelion, originally uploaded by Meer.

Ain’t Flickr great…I love this picture.

Categories
Computer Games Ireland

GAA Players On The PS2

There was a report in yesterday’s Tribune that caught my eye. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be on their website so I can’t link to it but it was a piece on the ongoing row between the GAA and the GBA about the image rights of the players, this time in relation to a new Playstation game by Sony. Now, I realise that there’s a whole lot more going on behind this, it’s just one more chapter in a big beef between these two groups but it just struck me as ridiculous.

According to the Tribune’s report the Gaelic Football players are up in arms because the game allows gamers to name the players on their make-believe teams whatever they want. So essentially they can play the All-Ireland final all over again with players of their choice or with players from whatever era or with whoever they want. The players are angry because they feel their image rights are not being protected in this. Hmm. Oookay. But fellas, your images aren’t being used. Your names may be but as I understand it this is just in the same way that any game provides the gamer with the ability to name the characters. So your name could be used but then again so could the entire cast of Coronation Streets’. There could be a Corrie v Crossroads playoff on some gamer’s console. Hey for all I know somebody could be using my name to play Halo with!! I feel so used!

Or maybe that’s it. I just have to wonder are they peeved because they’ve heard the stories about Tiger Woods or Ronaldo or Tony Hawks being paid big bucks to have their images used in the games that bear their names. If that’s the case then they’ve got their heads in the clouds. Ronaldo was involved in all aspects of his game from the cover to the promotion. An image of his face was used to texture the head of the ingame model. As for Tiger Woods, he was mo-capped (wore a ping-pong covered body suit that digitally tracked his movements) so that not only was his image used ingame, but so were his signature moves.

Perhaps this is what they’re getting at, maybe the players are hoping for some sweet deal that involves them in all the merchandising of this game and gives them a nice wad of cash. Well, I think they’re barking up the wrong tree by blaming the GAA for not securing this for them. Face it, a gaelic football game is never going to have the same global appeal as a Golf or Soccer game, no matter if it’s got Ryan McMenamin on the cover. I can’t even find a mention of it on amazon.co.uk. I would say that it was Sony who wasn’t interested in going to the hassle of putting the players’ faces on the ingame characters and they wouldn’t have been interested in shelling out big bucks to secure image rights when they can just go the easy route and leave it open to the gamer. It just wouldn’t make any difference to the bottom line. Those die-hard fans would still buy it and those who don’t know about Gaelic football won’t know who these guys are or care about the game.

Plus, with the developers being Australian I’d say they just tweaked their Aussie Rules game and regurgitated it to make it GAA.

Categories
Eve Personal

Guilt Trip

tantrum

I don’t drive. Yes it’s true, I’m in my 30’s and I just haven’t gotten around to it. I know how, I’ve had lessons many times over the years, I even own my own car and used to drive it…on short trips…avoiding all hills…and roundabouts. I just don’t have my full license and now that I have a baby I don’t think it’s right to drive without one. I mean, it’s one thing to put myself and thousands of other Dubliners at risk, but my precious baby?! Yes, trout-slap me now.

So, up until now I’ve not experienced the guilt-trip that is loading up your car in a car park. My sister looks after Eve and her own two-year-old son for the few hours I work every day and today she had one of those minor episodes that is the daily bread and butter of every parent of young children. She had just got back to the car when she discovered that her son had had a wardrobe-malfunction of the nappy variety and was soaked through. So, she strapped Eve into her carseat and then proceded to perfrom an emergency nappy change on the front seat of the car. Meanwhile she notices that another driver has decided to wait for her spot and slowly a long line of cars is forming behind him.

Trying desperately to get the nappy on to her furiously struggling toddler she can feel the weight of all those eyes upon her. That lovely feeling of being judged. She is so hassled she gives up trying to put his trousers back on and plonks him wearing just nappy, vest and coat into his carseat. At this point he decides he does not want to be in the carseat and proceeds to have a full on screaming, limb-flailing tantrum while she is trying to strap him in. Does this prompt the driver to move on? Noooo, he just sits there, with the queue of people behind him, all tapping their steering wheels and craning to watch the show.

As she struggles on, her face bright red, sweat streaming, one of the other drivers comes up and asks the lead driver would he please move on as there are plenty of other spaces further on and the line of traffic is starting to back up out onto the main road causing a traffic jam.

Phew! Thinks my sister, at last someone with some sense, she can carry on her battle without the audience. The first driver finally pulls away and goes on to find another spot. Only the line doesn’t budge because the next driver in line decides that he will now wait for her! So she has to finish the wrestling match with her son, whose screams have been joined by Eve’s who’s upset that he’s upset, and then she has to collapse the buggy, manhandle it into the boot and try to find space for the shopping…all with the impatient ticking of engines in her ears.

When she did get out onto the road she was already a good few miles away when she remembered the scratch card and packet of M&Ms she’d put on the roof while trying to find her keys. Good on her though, she was so peed off with the whole mess she went back to search and found the scratch card and the M&Ms on the side of the road. She decided she was just a little too embarrassed to be seen picking the M&Ms out of the gutter (I mean it was Dalkey you know!) but she swiped up the scratch card and ended up winning a fiver on it!