James Paige

Current mood: pixelated

I drew this inside the OHRRPGCE‘s built-in sprite editor. I drew it for the Castle Paradox Miss Pixel 2007 contest, but I was just a few hours too late for the ending deadline :(

A few more pictures at gilgamesh

Current mood: decelerating

Gravity has been bothering me a lot lately. It’s always there, pulling at me, so persistantly that I forget about it. I get stuck in a mindset of thinking that gravity is inevitable– part of life. I allow gravity to dominate my every motion, and act as if there is nothing I can do about it. What bothers me most is that everybody else seems to have accepted gravity. Are we to be defeated so easily? Can’t we fight back against it? Is there no solution to the gravity problem?

Current mood: Not Groggy

The unusual thing about motorcycles is that they don’t fall down. (I’m not saying they can’t, it’s just that they typically don’t) How does a motorcycle stay up? I mean, when it is standing still, it is really hard to balance. You have to use your feet or the kickstand or it will just topple over. (This is true for bicycles too, for those of us who haven’t actually ridden a motorcycle) But when the motorcycle starts moving, it stays up. It feels like magic. If it falls down when it is standing still, why should it be any different if it is moving?The answer is time dilation. As a moving object (the motorcycle) approches the speed of light, its mass increases, as predicted by special relativity. In four dimensional terms, the motorcycle compresses, bringing a little more of the future motorcycle into the present (or to put it another way, the motorcycle in the present catches up with the part of itself that is already in the future) This coexistance of present and future in the present is what prevents the act of “falling down”. If the motorcycle were to start to fall, it would have already started to fall, thus getting in its own way and propping itself back up.It doesn’t have to be a motorcycle. Any moving object approaching the speed of light can reproduce this effect. Try it yourself by running really fast and then trying to fall down.

See? It can’t be done.

Current mood: 12 percent dead, 70 percent really really good

About a month ago, a nice stranger named Erin noticed this drawing in my gallery, and asked me if I would draw a fairy for her to use in a tattoo. The finished product deviated greatly from what she originally described to me, so much so that I would be really surprised if it is of any use to her at all, but nonetheless, I did enjoy drawing it. It is nice to be inspired by someone else’s ideas once in a while.If any of you reading this would like to commission me to draw them a picture, just let me know (with the understanding that after you tell me what you want me to draw, I will then go and draw whatever I feel like drawing instead ;)

Current mood: Wise

Re: So what are you up to these days, Gilgamesh?

Oh, you know. The usual. Mostly just working on rebuilding Ninlil’s sanctuary in Nippur (you know, the one in Tummal that the mesopotamians razed?)I haven’t seen much of Enkidu lately, he’s always been too busy ever since he hooked up with that harlot Shamhat, but this weekend she is out of town, so he and I were gonna get together and I was thinking we would go to the Great Cedar Forest and try to kill the demon Humbaba.And Ishtar keeps calling me, so I have stopped answering my phone. Sorry if I missed any of your calls because of that. Last time I checked my voice-mail there were like 50 messages, and the first three were nothing but her going “Oh, Gilgamesh, I love you, I need you! Call me back or I will call upon the divine wrath of my father Anu!” I just deleted the rest. I don’t know what I’m going to do about that girl. So needy.

Current mood: upside-down

You may have heard the urban legend that you can trade a good pair of American Blue Jeans for a small car in Amsterdam. While that story is an exaggeration, it is true that blue denim trousers are often highly overvalued in certain economic contexts. If you haven’t done so recently, walk into any trendy clothing store targeting fashionable youth, and start looking at price tags.

Interestingly enough, blue jeans are especially prized in the supernatural realm, where the clothing industry still lags back at medieval levels.

Current mood: ATMA

Terra Branford, the main character from Final Fantasy VI (Final Fantasy III US). This was the last Final Fantasy game to use 2D pixel art instead of 3D. I think it was one of the best games ever made for the Super Nintendo. It was re-released as part of Final Fantasy Anthology in case you want to play it on your PS1 or PS2.Terra is usually drawn to look more like she did in Amano’s original concept art. I wanted something that was a little closer to the in-game sprites, but also inspired by Terra’s appearance in the Final Fantasy SGI demo

Current mood: Green but also slightly blue

Viola Concierto – 11 Nov 2005 – Megaron, Athens, GreeceDevoted classical music fans this weekend were treated to a spectacular concert, including a 24 minute Bass Violin solo, after which Viola smashed her instrument over an amp and stage-dived into the crowd.

Eight renown patrons of the fine arts were hospitalized from “mosh pit violence”, and dozens more were injured.

Despite controversy, both fans and critics can’t get enough of the new star who has revitalized Popular Classical music.

Upcoming shows
• 19 Nov 2005 – Prague Opera House – Prague, Czech Republic
• 27 Nov 2005 – Konserthuset – Stolkholm, Sweden
• 04 Dec 2005 – National Concert Hall – Dublin, Ireland
• 10 Dec 2005 – St John’s Smith Square – London, UK

2006 U.S. concert dates available soon

Current mood: Integrated

I love Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex, and not just because of Motoko.The show’s storyline centers around social, political, behavioral, and psychological ramifications of technology– especially the integration of human and machine, which is IMHO, one of the most important and interesting aspects of technology.

Superficially you may see a cartoon about a Sexy Cyborg Crime-fighter battling insane robots and evil hackers, but what I see is a futurist story about real issues that our children and grandchildren may face. I also, of course, see the Sexy Cyborg, (she is hard to miss) … actually, come to think of it, I suspect that Sexy Cyborgs is one of the issues our children and grandchildren may have to face :)

She is an interesting character. She’s human, but enough of her has been machine for so long that she can’t interact normally with other people anymore. In some episodes, her empathy for robots and artificial intelligences seems to be much stronger than her connection to other humans.

Something to think about… Imagine if you could just go out and buy a new body, let’s say for sake of example, costing about the same as a car costs today. You would just pick one out, customize it, and have your mind installed. How would that affect you? Our mind is the seat of our souls, but our experiences shape our minds, and our bodies can profoundly influence our experiences. Imagine if you were stronger, faster, more resilient, and more beautiful than you are now. Would your life be the same? Where would you be? Would you be doing the same things you do now? Would you be thinking the same things you think now?

And a final thought; Batou’s glasses are cool. They are basically part of his eyes. How long until I can order eyes like that on E-bay?

Current mood: more cowbell!

I used again the same raster-to-vector-to-raster method that I was experimenting on with the Sexy Pirate. Again I am amazed at how much detail is lost in the process, but the finished result looks better than what I would have ended up with if I had tried to leave in all the detail– most of the detail that was lost was scratches, smudges, and paper texture.

What I did differently this time was to add back a bit of that texture afterwards. Using The Gimp‘s image transfer brush, I copied over the texture on the bell. The light sketches on the bell were obliterated by the 1-bit pixelation step, but I liked them too much to lose them.

Now you want to know something interesting? I didn’t realize I was doing it, but just now as I was posting these pictures, I noticed that Belle’s pose here is highly similar to the pose of the Sexy Pirate.Here they are side-by-side with lines drawn over the major axises of aestetic balance. The shapes are very similar. I wonder why I did that? At the time when I drew the pencil-art for this, I had no awareness at all of the similarity.