Mario kart….

(owen is letting him win)

@mangoisgay Obligated mango ment

i want whoever is going to play ace in the live action to become best friends with iñaki, do the funniest youtube challenges with him and then post the silliest behind-the-scenes footage on social media to see them as the cutest siblings and not the marineford tragedy. the acting industry is full of the shittiest people but this is a friendship that i want to see blossoming in real life. i’m manifesting it

HBO Mario Kart Trailer - SNL

appreciation post for these absolute funky lads

i hope a few of their millions of siblings make a grand appearance in season 4

Ok I’m probably not the best person to say this, but I’ve been seeing a lot of (as of right now) accurate insults on how the CGI approach for the Live Action Little Mermaid movie, but please be mindful that you don’t take things too far, and *especially* don’t start going after Halle Bailey (Ariel’s actress) and to a lesser extent, Ariel the character.

Antiblackness is still an issue in a lot of fandom spaces, and it doesn’t just come out as using nasty slurs or stereotypes. It manifests as drawing Black characters lighter and/or with more white features, it comes out as removing Black partners from ships, and it starts out as plausibly deniable insults that get the door open to microaggressions and outright nasty comments.

I’m not saying that all discussion of the movie should be stalled, or even if it turns out to be an artistic failure, that it doesn’t merit discussion. I’m saying that you shouldn’t extend your vitriol to the characters and actors.

If you really feel the need to insult her, it might be worth a little introspection. Ask yourself, “Do I resent that they changed Ariel, or that they changed Ariel in this way?”. You’re not irredeemable if your personal answer isn’t kind. Just be more careful, try and observe how that sort of world view affects your behavior to others, and then course correct.

A lot of little kids would love to see another Black Princess. A lot of little kids would love to have a Black mermaid as a main character. Hell, a lot of adults would love those too. Black fantasy characters have long been excluded, transformed, killed, merely in the background, relegated to stereotypes, villainized and have hardly ever in the spotlight, especially in major productions.

Don’t make it harder for kids (and adults!) to see themselves on screen. Don’t ruin their wonder. So don’t make unkind comments. Keep it to yourself. Frankly, Halle looks beautiful, and I can’t wait to see the sparkles in her fans’ eyes as she swims across the screen.

Dibs on Toad

Jay: I call Toad!

Kai: What?! No, I always play Toad!

Jay: Well maybe you should’ve called it

Kai: *shaking tensely*

Cole: *panicked* wrong choice of wORDS JAY

Last night I had a dream about another Peter Lorre/Humphrey Bogart film. Mary Astor was in it too

She and Humf were in this big kinda Minecraft looking world, which included creepers, although I don't think either of them called them creepers, but they were just creepers. They were about the same height as them and looked exactly the same as creepers do in the game except some(but not all) were blue and white instead of green. I remember bogeys character punching one really aggressively

Then they were in this big Arctic looking world, but instead of icebergs there were big iceberg sized swirls everywhere that looked like white and blue striped toothpaste. I remember Mary Astor looking terrified and hiding behind one

I think Peter Lorre was on the same side as them in this dream? He was away from the action in a big ice cave full of computers that he was tinkering with in deep concentration or something. Syd might have been there aswell, but idk

Broke out my old GameCube that I bought for myself to bring to college and ordered several games that I had lost over the years off of eBay as an early birthday present to myself.

I was honestly scared that my memory was clouded by the nostalgia factor and the games would not hold up but no this is all I'm going to be doing for the next few weeks at least

One Last Ride…

Playing breath of the wild unlocked a gamer in me I didn't know existed because now for some ungodly reason I'm playing assassins creed 2, a game I had never touched nor considered touching, just cuz it's available on the switch

The Best Retro Racing Games to Get the Adrenaline Pumping

Up until recently, I didn’t have a high-end graphics card in my PC. This severely limited the types of games I could play, especially newer, more graphics-heavy ones that really suck up all the power that a computer can offer (I’m looking at you, Forza). Because of this, I mostly stuck with older racing titles that I grew up playing. Even now, with a higher-end but not top-tier card in my…

View On WordPress

The 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie is obviously not without its flaws: its production was not only hell for the actors but it was also, frankly, dangerous, and in retrospect it was definitely not the sort of film Nintendo wanted to attach their flagship franchise to. But much more so than the 2023 film the film understood that film and video games are two completely different mediums and that gameplay as it is shown in a video game is mostly a contrivance to grant players agency over the action. You can't make a film about an Italian man jumping on turtles and driving go-karts because jumping on turtles and driving go-karts are simply means of utilizing the language of video games towards telling the story. A video game movie that simply translates the act of gameplay (down to a progression of "levels") into film simply turns the player into a spectator: the interactivity lost the viewer is reduced to a passive recipient for what would undoubtedly be a fun set piece to play but does not serve any major narrative function,

The bank robber on the phone with the hostage negotiator: Please just send the SWAT team in to kill us all

This was a pure joy to work on.

For the behind-the-scenes story of how I made this animated mini-short, click “keep reading” below.

I started this 6 weeks ago, just before Nintendo shut down its 3DS and WiiU servers. The server shutdown meant no more multi-player online play for 3DS games, like Mario Kart 7, but also no more uploading to the Butterfly Animation online gallery directly from the app.

As an homage to the Inchworm and Butterfly Animation apps for the DSi and 3DS that I’ve been animating on since 2011, I originally was just going to animate just a single shot featuring something butterfly related.

But the story evolved as I began asking myself a series of "what if" questions that I had fun answering, like, “what if it was a little girl playing dress up as a butterfly?” And then “what if she was first cosplaying as a caterpillar then the butterfly?” “If this is a story of growth, what if she stumbles? What is her attitude when she stumbles?” “What if the design of the girl was something like Isao Takahata or Yoichi Kotabe would draw?”

Making this was the embodiment of everything I hope to achieve with my personal animation: to let creativity flow and just have fun animating and creating.

Since this mini-short was animated on my Nintendo 3DS, there was a memory limit of only 100 drawings, which was a bit of a challenge for longer or complex actions, but was a fun puzzle to solve. Sometimes limitations force you to come up with even more creative solutions. (I was able the squeeze in more drawings than the memory allowed, and filled it to the max!) :)

The song I used is from Rebecca Sugar’s album, "Spiral Bound", and perfectly fit the theme of the short. Initially, while I was drawing the character, I found myself humming a tune from Steven Universe that dealt with beginnings, endings, and not being ready. It’s amazing how the brain can subconsciously pick the playlist!

In the end, that song, sung by Steven’s father in the show, didn’t quite fit, but then I remembered another song by Rebecca Sugar which was more on theme with my story, called “My Own Way to the End”. The whole album is wonderful! You can check it out here:

Painting the backgrounds for this was the most challenging thing for me, but also the most eye opening! After painting, I would look around at the trees in the neighborhood differently. So many colors when you really look closely.

There’s so many talented people at my work and it was great that I could ask them for advice. One person I asked was the talented Tia Kratter, who happened to teach a mini-painting class for the animators while I was working on this short. I asked her for advice on one of the background paintings and she asked great questions which challenged me to try different things, but I still felt like I was having fun and playing without fear of failure. I mean, it was still hard though! Hahaha!

If you’ve read up to this point, thank you for reading this. :) I hope you enjoy this mini-short as much as I enjoyed making it!

A short list of unity games owned by notoriously lawsuit happy companies:

Hearthstone, Activision Blizzard

Pokemon Go, Niantic and more specifically the Pokemon Company

Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, see above

Like 17 different mobile and console Disney games

Genshin Impact, miHoYo

Magic Arena, WotC and their big daddy Hasbro

Mario Kart Tour, Nintendo

The Elder Scrolls: Legends, Bethesda

Super Mario Run, Nintendo

Call of Duty Mobile, Activision Blizzard

Unity was used to render backgrounds for a number of the modern "Live Action" Disney remakes. Notably The Lion King remake in 2019 has been confirmed to have used unity.

In short. They. Are. FUCKED

Various ways in which I have underestimated my chickens (callout post to myself):

cognitive abilities (memory): I dropped some pasta while making a salad earlier and Louise was nearby so I opened the door and invited her into the kitchen to come clean up. At first she just meandered round the room glaring suspiciously at furniture because she's unfamiliar with the inside of my house, then I helped her locate the pasta and she pounced, but before she could eat all of them Morille came zooming across the room with Pandolf zooming behind her, which freaked out the hen who noisily flew-ran out of the room. She stayed away long enough that when I called her inside again I expected her to have forgotten all about the pasta, and that I would have to show it to her again, but instead she went straight for it, resolutely, having clearly kept this important goal in a corner of her teeny tiny mind this whole time.

hunting abilities: before getting chickens I didn't realise they actually hunted? (sometimes.) I pictured their search for food as quiet foraging, busily scratching the dirt for worms, but a) hens are never quiet they're always chattering to each other so already that part was wrong; b) when they find a worthy prey they hunt it with the fierce determination of a mountain lion. I once saw Dru chasing a grasshopper across half the pasture, running at full chicken speed and sometimes boosting herself with her wings Mario kart-style while the grasshopper desperately hopped for its life, until eventually she pounced with her beak wide open and managed to catch it mid-jump. With an action movie soundtrack this scene would have been every bit as intense and gripping as a cheetah hunting a gazelle in a wildlife documentary.

social abilities (empathy): one time Cordélia had a little bit of grass stuck in her eye and she kept rubbing her head with her claw to try and dislodge it unsuccessfully, and then she seemingly asked Dru for help, placing her face very close to the other hen's face like "see that stupid twig?" and Dru removed it with her beak. Again that's not something I would have expected from a hen... they're very disloyal creatures, so it was fascinating to see. They would stab their grandma for a dusty rigatoni but leaving a friend with something stuck in her eye is apparently a level of antisocial even chickens won't cross.

social abilities pt.2 (romantic sensibility): sometimes when the night sky is clear and you can see the Milky Way, instead of tucking themselves in at sundown like they usually do, they'll fly to the roof of their coop and sit there for a little while to watch the stars together. Okay this one may be a tiny bit less scientific an observation than the others but I don't have an explanation for this behaviour; I've never noticed anything wrong with their coop on these particular nights, the door is open, they can go in—and the girls don't seem stressed at all, if anything they look like they're having a nice peaceful moment and I feel bad for bothering them.