Holy Cow, You Guys, You Gotta See This Art

So I held off on posting this, because I wanted to right by the artist I'm about to spotlight.  My normal means of sharing artwork I really like (with one or two slight exceptions) is to share the work and then link the living daylights out of the person who created the art in the hopes that people will go and view the rest of his art themselves and perhaps share it with even more people.

I've been told by various online sources that this doesn't technically make me a jerk on the Internet, since I am being sure to share where it's from and not claiming any of it as my own.

But I could do better.

In this instance, it didn't really feel right to just grab a few images and say "hey, guys, go look here and see more!"  I wanted to do right by this artist, so I sent him an email and asked him if he minded my sharing his artwork and encouraging people to visit his site.

Normally, when I try things like this, I get no response.  Which is fair enough, we've established before that I tend to be late to the party for many things, but in this case I got lucky.  Within a few hours I got a response where the artist gave me his blessing with the following two caveats:

"Use the images unedited."  Not a problem, anything I could possibly do to them would diminish the entire reason I'm sharing these to begin with.

"Only use my earlier series."  More than fair.

So with this entire sentence acting as the first (but not the last) link to his site, I hereby encourage all of you to go visit the site of Jirka Vinse, aka Jirka Väätäinen aka (?) Jonatan Väätäinen.

Oh, and prepare to have your mind blown.

It's Pumpkin Season!

Every year, I love carving pumpkins for the kids in the neighborhood where my parents live.  I've done The Avengers, video game characters, and a few for my own enjoyment (the Ghostbusters logo comes to mind.

This year, I was sorely tempted to doThe Guardians Of The Galaxy, but when I realized how much work it would be to do Groot, I concluded I'd rather eat a whole pumpkin.  Without chewing.

So instead I decided to do something else still hugely popular.  Something... chilling.

...that was bad.  I apologize.



I'll acknowledge that Olaf didn't come out as neat as I like, but carving a carrot nose on a pumpkin is really hard.

Top Eleven: Top Eleven Of 2013

So yesterday I decided to revisit the source of most of the pain I felt doing this blog and look at the eleven worst things I had to deal with.  So let's turn it around for the eleven things I enjoyed reviewing, discussing, or simply prompting like an unpaid advertiser in the year 2013.

Review: Frozen

In the 90s, I was spoiled for television options once cable became the big thing.  I can still remember when having just a few channels suddenly exploded into almost a hundred (yeah, I know, I'm old), but the number kept growing and growing as time moved on, and every possible thing you wanted to watch was on.  Old movies? Check.  Cartoons? Check.  Educational? Check.

However, one of the primary shows I reme- wait a minute.

Something feels off.  Hey, magic Internet voice, is something different?

Oh, we're doing this instead?  Okay, I can work with this.  Ladies and gentlemen, my review of Frozen.  Does it live up to the hype?  Will there be any massive spoilers?  ...well, I can promise a "not really" on the second question, anyway.