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Today I made a new avatar for my Ubuntu Forums account. I figured I’d mash up a bunch of stuff that’s been of interest to me lately, so I ended up with this:

Mario and Sonic are friends now. They’re been featured together now in two separate Olympics-themed games, as well as the Super Smash Bros. series. I wonder if Tails knows about this. He can get pretty jealous when it comes to Sonic. What this blog theme doesn’t show well is that the avatar has rounded corners. That was a bit of a hassle to accomplish. I had to make a rectangular selection with rounded corners, invert the selection, then apply alpha transparency to the four “corners” left behind. The copy is hand-written, as it were. There’s a calligraphic brush tool, which I used with the touch pad on my laptop to draw the letters. I did everything in the GIMP, which is a deceptively powerful image manipulation program. You can get it for Windows, too. It’s like the light version of Photoshop, and it’s free (of course).

I’ve been getting interested in the Sonic universe lately. It’s almost like the Mario universe was for me last summer; Sonic is something new, complete with its own spin-off media. He also gets featured heavily in YouTube Poops; the animated Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog has been extensively drawn from for these. Dr. Robotnik’s voice acting is so over the top that it lends itself very well to the hallowed art of the Poop. There’s an entire sub-genre of YTP devoted to the short segments found at the end of these animated episodes. These are called “Sonic Sez” and are part of that obnoxious 90s initiative to try to teach kids lessons through the mouths of their most beloved cartoon and video game characters. These YTPs jumble up the words and make Sonic say dirty or otherwise deleterious things to both the audience and Tails. Poor Tails! Sonic can be so mean to him.

Speaking of YTP, I came across some that feature Billy Mays. I know it’s somewhat irreverent considering that he’s dead and all, but most of them were made before he died and several of them are quite hilarious. Here’s one of my favorites (it also has a sequel):

I laughed so hard I cried! I know at some level it’s immature, but it’s kind of like the Tourette’s Guy video when the bird got in the house—shamefully funny.

Speaking of funny, for my Oral Communications class I had to write my own eulogy. I made to be entirely serious while I dubiously twisted my future into a cruel irony: I opened the passage with a statement to the effect that I must have fallen out of the sky (because of my uniqueness). I made myself die at the age of 97 from a tragic skydiving accident, tying back to the opening statement and making it literal. With great sincerity I read this passage to the class, who loved it. I might post it here as a separate page; it would give me an excuse to get back into web development, which I have neglected ever since the first week of summer vacation.

Just a quick update. My life has been school, home, and YouTube (which I manage to visit in both places).