I love the smell of melted crayons in the morning...

Ahhhh crayons. Remember the neatly curled paper wraps? The slightly greasy-fingered feel after a session of hard-core colouring? The poignant smell of a tin of melted crayons left in the sun too long?

Crayon memories have been percolating to the surface ever since receiving a few crayon colours in the Everything game on Facebook. I remember getting a rocket-shaped plastic tube once, full of
more colours than I'd ever had before! I was fervently proud of my rocket ship of Crayons, and I still remember how monumentally pissed off I was when one of my neighbour playmates dropped it during a shared colouring binge, breaking the case and snapping some of the precious little nubs of colour. Lucky none of the purple ones were broken or it would have been WAR!

Anyway, if you remember Crayons too, check out this article about the shift in crayon colours over time at Weather Sealed. It includes this awesome chart.

I want a huge print out of that on my wall, stat!

Ok ok a real post. I've been making stuff!

I had a tremendous time over the holidays making things for Whirled, mainly furniture for the Kawaii theme including some trees that I'm quite happy with (one had 70 purchases in the first 24 hours so I guess I'm not the only one!).

I also made a backdrop that I'm very proud of, because despite my allergy to coding I sat down and played with Actionscript long enough to code some randomly generated clouds. They are very relaxing to watch, and the result is much smoother and less laggy than anything you could do with normal animation.

You can view the room here:

Launch the full version of Whirled


And if you want to play with Actionscript, you can see the code I used here (because I did have to ask for some help to get it working! but happily I got most of it done on my own).

What do you do with your junk mail?

No, not the organ enlargement mail you get on the computer - I mean the stuff that gets shoved in your mailbox. You know - Woolworths catalogues, takeaway menus, real estate ads and at certain times of the year stacks of glossy pamphlets with shiny-faced politicians?
Well, for a while I used to cut them all up into seperate colours, and turn them into collages. Like this:

Clicky clicky goodness!

There are some new games on Whirled that I'm really enjoying - Bang! Heroes has finally been released - a cowboy themed scroller with single player and multiplayer options. While there are still some bugs around, the gameplay is smooth and I really like the music and artwork. This is a cut down flash cross-over with the full game, Bang! Howdy, which has many more characters and features, so I'd say there are more features to come for this game.

My other favourite game was not created by Three Rings (the creators of Whirled), but instead by one of the many indie flash developers taking advantage of the Whirled platform to share their games. Emerald Activities new game, Create and Rate, certainly fits in with the Whirled spirit of creativity and player imagination. In it you use premade pieces, which you can colour, pattern and arrange, to make your own picture, which is then rated by your fellow players to see who has made the winning creation. Categories for the game include fashion, horses, dragons, and prehistoric.

I had so much fun with this, either by trying to weird out my fellow players, or completely throw the category and theme out the window (this is in the "Horse" mode game):


Or recreating movie scenes (this is in "Fashion" game mode):


And I think I'll stop there all I'll want to post all of the 20 or so scenes that I liked enough to use the game option that lets me save it to my hard drive. I'll try to embed it below - if you like puzzles and creating things, I recommend you give it a go!



Launch the full version of Whirled

Holy Crap - I love this stuff!

I just watched a show I taped on Tuesday night (I was too tired to stay up). I'm so glad I did! Finally I get to find out who made the amazing artwork that I photographed and drooled over while Melbourne. It seems they were mostly made by Melbourne based Ghostpatrol and Miso. The show was Artscape and it's showing again on ABC2 on Sunday, so do yourself a huge favour and watch it - or at least check out their sites (Miso's appears to be under construction but Ghostpatrol has enough examples to see what they are about - the program had much better examples though).

Below is a photo from my Flickr that I took in Melbourne - it was this one in particular that had me curious!

Flickr Update Mark II - Begone, ye download limit!

Alas, originally uploaded by trowzers.

I can has direct posting to blogs from flickr? I can?! Well how about that!
I gave my poor little Ixus a workout on the holidays, only to forget to resize them before uploading to flickr and running headlong *smash* into my upload limit.
Methinks a pro account is pending... (Well why not? It costs the same per year as a couple of nice lunches...)
The picture of the poor little cherub above was taken during a jaunt at the local boneyard - the enormous, sprawling acres of the Toowong Memorial Cemetary. The area I walked around mainly dated from the last century, and many graves are extremely rundown with some sad signs of deliberate vandalism such as the statue above. Still, the walk was strangely uplifting - and some of the masonry was spectacular. I think I will probably go for another walk there soon - I certainly couldn't cover all 108 acres on my first visit!

Updated Flickr

I've added more photos to my Flickr page, so now it is a bit more interesting I thought I would add it in here.
I've included some photos of the graffiti in Hosier and Union Lanes in Melbourne - including my favourite one:

Christmas List....

Steampunk computer mouse


to go with a...


Steampunk screen and keyboard fitout


And then a cute plush toy to sit on the top:


Lucky for my wallet, none of this stuff is actually available for sale. *SIGH*

Utterly Perfect

Check out Glennz's site for more stunning T-shirt designs. WANT!