Skull Brother Piggybacks on SAO's Death Gun

Mini Conference Room at Instagram's Office

My younger son and I stopped by Instagram/Facebook's headquarters last week to pick up a tote bag from the #EatDrawGram event at the Natural History Museum back in May.

Christine Banawa very kindly showed us around and let us pose in the mini conference room, which I guess is what one does while visiting Instagram.  I am uncertain what the diminutive room might be saying about social media, Instagram, or corporate office culture... Perhaps it is just referencing the fact that there are over 1000 Facebook employees in the office and a mere 30 something people working at Instagram, a difference of scale that might not be immediately apparent to the casual user.

I just spent 45 seconds on Google and have determined that the mini conference room is also ascribed to the larger entity of Facebook... and apparently they have a sideways room in the London office.

So I guess I am trying to read too much into it.
 
Despite exuding a bored attitude at the time, my son was quite impressed with the visit. He got to wear his own name tag (which indicated that he had not signed a non-disclosure agreement) and to have soft serve ice cream from the corporate cafeteria. While I usually avoid posting actual photos of the kids on the napkin blog, I am pretty sure he would feel denied if I did not include this one.

I think there is some probably merit for a kid whose parents work at home to see what a corporate office looks like...even if it is an atypical one with both chocolate and vanilla soft serve ice cream and a bar of ice cream toppings...

Thanks again to Christine Banawa and Kristen Joy Watts from Instagram and The American Museum of Natural History!

Birthday napkin

Sam, one of the kids' two aunts had a birthday last week. 

The kids wanted to be portrayed riding a dinosaur on the napkin/card. 

So here they are, sort of. 

The dinosaur ended up rather non-descript. I considered making it more of the feathery/prickly "Dinosaurs Among Us" bird like dino, but couldn't in good conscience put a kid in shorts on such an uncomfortable creature. It ended up a muddy, undecorative creature.

As usual, my portraits of  the kids were not stellar, but I did manage to accurately capture the sullen expression on my younger son's face. 

The Fruit Viking is Grateful

No child was made sticky during the drawing of this napkin.

It's that time again....
The end of the school year has arrived and there are people to whom we cannot possibly express enough appreciation....
The solution once again is a clumsy portrait of the kid on a napkin and some pretentious chocolate bars.

Astoundingly, my son was not offended by this drawing. He usually objects to any drawing that I do of him because there is always something wrong with the likeness. But not this time. I am perplexed.

He himself requested the watermelon helmet. His school mascot is supposedly a Viking, although I was unable to find any associated imagery associated online. While aimlessly Googling for Viking pictures, we came across the fruit helmet as a display if not an actual wearable. (But there are plenty of people actually wearing them...)

While we did purchase a large, and rather mediocre, watermelon at Cosco over the weekend, no rind helmets were actually worn during the production of this napkin.

What the kids really wanted to do with the melon was smash it with a sledgehammer, or make it  explode using rubber bands.

Thank you, YouTube.  
 

Mr. Toots from "Red Faction" vs. Happy from "I Hate Fairyland"

Rainbow Battle:

The kids have always been enamored of Mr Toots, who is apparently one of the acquirable weapons in the "Red Faction: Armageddon" game. One holds the unicorn like a gun, and when he is somehow triggered, he farts a deadly rainbow blast.  (They have never played this game- this information came from YouTube of course.)

And of course they loved Skottie Young's first volume of "I Hate Fairyland" a gleefully profane child-inappropriate spin on what happens when a young girl named Gertrude is sent on a quest in a magical kingdom....and then what happens when she is still stuck there two decades later.

Gertrude's competition in the graphic novel is Happy, a girl who initially has much better luck on the fairytale quest....and who can shoot deadly rainbows.

While reading the book, our older son proclaimed, "Happy is my new spirit animal!"

But could she beat Mr. Toots in a fair fight?
Or in an unfair one?

Artorias and Sif from Dark Souls 3

Hungry Like the Wolf for Dark Souls:

Our older son continues to obsess about playing Dark Souls. And he continues to need to tell the rest of the family chapter and verse about the game. Trying to redirect the conversation to what might have happened IRL (In Real Life) is rarely fruitful. With characteristic massive understatement, he said at dinner last night, "I'm starting to get the impression that the rest of the family is not as fascinated with Dark Souls as I am."

(Our younger son likes the Duran Duran song, but is not all that interested in the game.)

This faceless guy on the napkin is a boss in the game, and apparently one of our son's favorites. And he hangs out with a wolf.  That is all I can report. I do try to listen to my son's monologues on the various bosses of the game, and I did take a brief look at the game's Wiki... but I can't really relate any meaningful information.  For instance, a selection from Artorias's page on the Wiki:

"Sir Artorias the Abysswalker was one of the Four Knights of Lord Gwyn. He only makes an appearance in the past, as he is deceased by the time the Chosen Undead escapes the Undead Asylum."

So there.

I was not able to get a good look at this guy's armor, or his wolf, so this is not particularly accurate. My apologies to all who are invested enough in the game to be able to glean some useful information from the above paragraph.

Yogi Anchovy Member of the Mafiosi with Porky Porgie Welsh Corgi

One Fish, Two Fish....

Just when you thought I might be done with the PuppyMonkeyBaby drawing series....

I suppose it really should have been Yogi Bear's head rather than that of a spiritual leader, but I already used the cartoon bear's head in another drawing in the series, so I had to make do with a human....

And Anchovies are a lot smaller than Porgies, so the relative scale is not very accurate.

Red From Angry Birds with Deadpool

Better Red than Dead?

(Two wisecracking red and black guys who are strangely indestructible)

Our sons were perfectly happy to see the Angry Birds Movie last weekend.
But they still would prefer to see the R rated Deadpool movie.