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.

Dark Souls Avatar with Flaming Hand

"Mom! My hand's on fire! Mom! my hand's on fire! Mom!...."

Setting one's avatar's hand on fire and making him run in circles exclaiming about the flaming hand seems to be something one can do to pass the time until the next iteration of the Dark Souls game is released. 

While I don't particularly appreciate this activity, I do always enjoy drawing flames.

Dark Souls Avatar Again

My son has a new upgraded avatar in the Dark Souls game....
and no, it is no longer this guy.  In the time that it took me to draw this one, he had moved on to a man with a head that appears to be on fire.

He told me that he liked this one because it resembled the Solaire character. (That's the buckethead doing the sun salutation from a couple of days ago)

And he is holding the very important spear of someone very important. The details have escaped me it seems.

Even worse, I now have to go remove the kid from the Xbox....(or is it remove the Xbox "from his cold dead hands?" as he would say) and force him to do his homework.  If only I had an important spear to help with this task.

Solaire from Dark Souls

A "grossly incandescent" lunch napkin:

Solaire is "knight of the sun" who, according to the Dark Souls wiki, "does not let the crumbling world affect his mood." He is mostly helpful to the player, and offers some peculiar dialogue along the lines of, "The sun is a wondrous body./ Like a magnificent father!/ If only I could be so grossly incandescent!"

Our older son took a packed lunch to school for a field trip today, and specifically requested an image of this knight.

While he cannot play "Dark Souls" every available waking moment that he is not in school.... I suspect that he is always thinking about it. Of course, I feel that he spends way too much time playing this game...and of course, he feels the exact opposite.

The constant wrangling over screen time makes me feel incredibly tired. As I have mentioned before, I suspect that I was born without the video game gene. Despite the impressive and immersive visuals now available on the Xbox... well, I would rather just go do something else (like drawing ridiculous things, for instance). But I try to pay attention to what is going on in my son's games and try to learn why they are so remarkably compelling to him. When he tells me that homework is getting in the way of the really important stuff than he needs to do, the disapproving adult in me wants to summarily dismiss him as an immature person with an addictive habit. While I do compel him to finish his homework and do all that other stuff AFK or IRL ("away from keyboard" or "in real life") I also try to appreciate what he ( and millions of other people) find so compelling about games like Dark Souls.

I don't think this issue will go away until after he no longer lives with me, or until my dementia increases to the point where I no longer care....

Whichever comes first.

Dark Souls Avatar

 

Me before I put on my makeup.

The above caption comes from my older son, aspiring meme generator that he is.

His avatar in the Dark Souls 2 game is a sort of zombie who seems to have very brightly colored wisps of hair...or maybe that is the "healing factor"? I cannot say for sure.  I couldn't really get a grip on the detail on the armor either, but I thought the combination of the greenish zombie face and the flossy yellow pink of the hair was nice.

Garden Warfare 2 Birthday Cake

Agent Orange and the Pirate Zombie from "Plants vs. Zombies 2" on a birthday cake.
And Pirate zombie with strategically placed birthday candle:

Quite remarkably, our older son turned thirteen this week.

In related, remarkable only to me news, I have completed my baking and frosting duties for the foreseeable future.

This is a good thing. After staying up appallingly (and embarrassingly) late to squirt frosting on this cake, and then hosting a dozen adolescents at our apartment for an afternoon festival of video games, whacking with Nerf swords, and rubbing of frosting on various surfaces, I feel like I might have had my eightieth birthday this week....

My son wanted me to make the whole cake into an iphone and the image a selfie. While I thought that a lovely concept, I did not manage to pull it off. He did not announce his choice of characters until 8 pm last night, so he is very lucky that he got anything beyond white frosting and the "Happy 13" text.

Nikola Tesla and His Favorite Pigeon

That special connection between a man and his favorite urban fowl:

Tesla may have been a germaphobe with OCD, but he had extremely positive feelings about New York City pigeons. Not only did he feed them in Bryant Park, he brought sick and injured birds back to his hotel room for nursing. As previously mentioned in the blurb for our Tesla and Pikachu napkin, he claimed to have a special relationship with one white pigeon that he said he loved "as a man loves a woman."

This image here was not one of my better efforts. Tesla became quite emaciated in his later life and removed his distinctive mustache, so he is a bit difficult to recognize in photographs and I did not have much success with his likeness.

I also had some trouble deciding what the situation should be with the light source in this image. Initially, I was thinking about trying to make it look like the glow from a plasma lamp, but I tried to stay away from drawing actual bolts of electricity, and the results are pretty muddy.

Our older son is still working on his research paper on Tesla. His younger brother says that he asked for a plasma globe for his recent birthday not because of all of the talk about Tesla, but because he had seen one in a YouTube video.

As it turned out, my image doesn't do plasma lamps, pigeons, or Mr. Tesla justice.
But the kids are quite excited about the real plasma lamp, so perhaps my drawing can be a little bit cool by association.

Nikola Tesla with Pikachu

Our older son is in the throes of researching a paper on Nikola Tesla.  As it turns out, the selection of this topic was a perhaps somewhat overly ambitious.

Tesla has enjoyed quite a bit of popularity on the world wide web over the last several years. If you waste any time online, you have probably encountered some sort of widely shared post about how Tesla was an unrecognized genius who was responsible for everything from basic electricity to cell phones and the internet.

One would think that with all this recent notoriety, that there would be some research materials out there appropriate for seventh graders... or more specifically, for seventh graders who would rather be playing video games than slogging through 500 page texts full of detailed history and scientific terminology.

The research problems caused by this lack of age-appropriate materials has resulted in me learning more about Tesla than I might have intended. This is not all bad of course. Tesla has a fascinating biography and reading about him has also revealed how much I need to learn about basic electrical principles. On the other hand, I do not need to repeat 7th grade, so the situation is not so very delightful.

But I have learned more that enough about the man to hypothesize that he would have been pretty enthusiastic about Pikachu:

Tesla really loved electricity... and not just as a topic of scientific research and commercial engineering.  He believed in both its philosophical power and potent health effects. He frequently treated himself and others with electric current for for mental heath and digestive function. (He also initially believed that X-rays had health benefits, but fortunately quickly discovered evidence to the contrary)

He had a powerful imagination and was an enthusiast for the fantastic.  Picking up a beeping sound of unknown origin on a receiver in his laboratory in Colorado Springs, he seems to have arrived at the conclusion that he was receiving messages from intelligent life on Mars.

And, last but not least, at the end of his life, he was an ardent fan of small creatures in the form of pigeons. He was, by many accounts, obsessed with the pigeons that he fed daily in Central Park. He himself wrote about one bird in particular, "I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life." As Tesla did not marry and seems to have never had a significant relationship with a woman other than his mother, maybe we should not read too much into that statement. Still, he cared very much about animals and their welfare, espousing vegetarianism to avoid cruelty. Despite his pigeon romance, by the end of his life, he did not seem to be having much success in his relationships with people or money.

But perhaps things would have worked out better for him if there had been an electric Pokemon for him to bond with.

Kylo Ren and Darth Revan

 

Everyone needs a little R & R in their Star Wars universe. 

(Pithy tagline provided by my 12 year old son)

When the first "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" trailer came out a few months ago, there was a lot of conjecture about just who was that guy with the red lightsaber with the cross guards?  Some Star Wars authorities opined that it was a "Knights of the Old Republic" character, Darth Revan. Of course, Darth Revan lived thousands of years before the events of the Star Wars movies.... (You already knew that, right?) Therefore, it was rather unlikely that he would be appearing in the movie.

I guess he was such a cool dude that people were still hoping that the guy in the mask was going to turn out to be him. My older son tells me that Darth Revan could crush a planetoid the size of the Death Star just using his force powers. Take that, Luke Skywalker.

At any rate, while this Revan person is not in the upcoming film, it seemed like he should be paired with the guy who is, Kylo Ren.

They can commiserate about how challenging it is to not be able to see out of one's helmet, and how hard it is to go to the bathroom while wearing a floor length robe.

Perhaps the force comes in handy for that sort of thing.

Powerful Pumpkins

 

What did one Jack O Lantern say to the other?

"Cut it out."

Maybe not.  Maybe he said, "Watch out, or I am going to zap you with my lightning force powers!"

There's been a weird post-Halloween trend at our house in which the boys pretend to be pumpkins...not inert gourds, but fighting pumpkins with super powers.  

It defies explanation mostly. I think it has something to do with the "pumpkin armor" and "pumpkin costume" available in the Terraria game. 

I was going to draw said costume or armor, but the boys had made some pictures of their characters, and wanted me to work from their sketches. They explained that both pumpkin guys could generate force lightning and that one was wearing a wizards hat, and the other, a red fez.  

My favorite moment of their pumpkin game was an instance during a sword fight where the older brother had just skewered the younger with a Nerf weapon.  The elder pronounced him dead or at least injured, but the younger replied, "No, you just stuck your sword into my cut-out eye hole. You didn't hurt me at all."

They told me that in my drawing the pumpkins were too human and not cute enough.

Yep.

Spooky Scary Skeletons

A Unicorn, a Velociraptor....and some guy....send shivers down your spine....and are really hard to draw.

As usual, I discovered that the phrase that my older son has been contantly repeating recently was not of his own manufacture, but was actually proliferating on the Internet.  My first tip-off came when one of his friends came over to, yes, play video games, and said the same phrase over and over in the same tone of voice.  (Again, I have been consistently sleep deprived for well over a decade, so it takes a lot for me to catch on.)

At any rate, "Spooky Scary Skeletons" is a 1996 song by Andrew Gold, a video of a classic Disney animation with the song that has over 5.3 million views on Youtube, some Minecraft video spin-offs, etc, etc. I am just going to say that there's a link to the "know your meme" page on the topic because I don't think I can begin to unpack all of it right now.

My son asked for unicorn, Alien and velociraptor skeletons doing a high kicking "Michigan J Frog" style dance.  I was definitely not up to the challenge.  I had a hard enough time just drawing some vaguely anatomically correct skeletons and trying to put one in front of the other.  And what does the Alien skeleton look like anyway? (No doubt the answer is available online somewhere...)

The original Disney short of the dancing skeletons is truly inspired and inspiring... and I should have done better. Maybe I will give it another shot.

My son had something more like this in mind...with skeletons. Easy, right?

Happy Halloween from Pumpzilla

Or maybe it's a Kaiju O Lantern?

Since the younger child starred on the last pumpkin-themed napkin, we had to give the other, Godzilla costumed, one equal time.

My younger son did look at this napkin wistfully and said, "I wish pumpkins could actually do that."


The Doctor and the Terrible Lizard pose after trick or treating.

Godzilla and the Prom Queen: A Halloween Team-up

A close female friend of my older son describes her Halloween costume as a "Goth Prom Queen turned Demon."  As the parent of two sons, I must admit to being grateful that I have been able to remain blissfully ignorant of the complexities of female preteen Halloween costume choices.

I did not get to see my inflatable Godzilla son interact with the ironic prom queen at their Middle School Halloween dance last weekend, so I had to resort to imagining them together... sort of.

My depiction of her is not a particularly good likeness, but it is definitely more realistic than my drawing of my son's Godzilla costume.  For various reasons, we ended up with an adult sized costume.  Despite containing a slight 12 year old, it still inflated to its maximum volume, so the resulting height to width ratio was perhaps a bit peculiar... And not like that drawn on the napkin.

The photo below is of the 8 year old brother wearing the costume, so the height to width ratio is even more un Godzilla-like, but I am so amused by the tiny human toes peaking out of the feet, that I could not resist including it.

Gamera, Godzilla and Ultraman Cakewalk

Hello My Giant Baby:

My sons have matured quite a bit since last Halloween: They have done much less obsessing months in advance about their potential costumes and less frantic changing of costume plans than in past years.  Nonetheless, if I had gone ahead with all of the costumes that they swore they were definitely completely positive that that they were going to want to wear for this upcoming Halloween....well, we would have a lot of extra costumes.

At the moment, that is, today on September 25th, with slightly more than a month left before Halloween, we seem to have settled on Godzilla for the older brother and the 11th Doctor Who for the younger.  Will these choices stick until October 31st? Past experience tells me no.

Historically, the costume choice always changes again as soon as the costume chooser's mother has made significant efforts to purchase or fabricate the components.

But I remain optimistic.  Maybe this year will be different. The older child says he has made some sort of arrangement with two friends: They are going to dress as Gamera and Ultraman to go with his Godzilla. Perhaps this group effort will keep him from changing his mind at the last minute.  (But I am concerned that the challenge of making a Gamera do not bode well for the group effort.)

When I suggested that maybe there should be a Halloween costume team-up napkin, my son told me what he really wanted was the three of them doing the "Hello My Baby" dance.  I tackled this dance issue, with little success, on the Alien/Raptor/Unicorn napkin shown below. At least I managed to get all the hats and canes on the napkin that time. Select the napkin if you want to read about the song and the frog who sings it.

Alien, Raptor & Unicorn do the Michigan Rag

Leeroy Jenkins Chicken Fight

At least his chicken has weapons:

I often find when my sons are annoying me by loudly repeating some nonsensical word or phrase, that if I look into the source of that phrase, I will discover that, not only did they not invent the annoying phrase, but they are referencing some widespread pop culture meme phenomenon that I had completely missed. The discovery of my own ignorance does make me more tolerant of the obsessive use of the catchphrase...for a while.

My older son's favorite exclamation of the last couple of weeks has been a loud, extended yell: "LEEEROY JENNNKKINNSSSS!!!"  This usually is heard as he runs off to do something that he should not...like hammer his brother on the head with a foam axe.

At this moment, half of you are shaking your head in sad disbelief that I had never heard of Leeroy Jenkins. For the those of you (in addition to my mom) who are as woefully uninformed as I was- and are still reading- I will try to explain as briefly as possible:

The shouting of "Leeroy Jenkins" made its way into the pop culture mainstream via a 2005 video of several players on the World of Warcraft MMORPG (that's "Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game" if you require further elucidation) At the beginning of the video, they are all standing around interminably and nerdishly discussing their strategy for an upcoming attack on a nest of dragon-like creatures. Leeroy, a member of the group who has been silently sitting turned away from the discussion, suddenly stands up and rushes off alone to attack, shouting his name loudly and gutterally like a battle cry.  The rest of the group is startled and disorganized, but follows him. Complete massacre of all players ensues. After all are dead, Leeroy comments nonsensically, "at least I have chicken."

Something in excess of 30 million views of the original video on YouTube led to appearances at video game conventions by Ben Schultz, the guy playing as Leeroy.  There were Leeroy references on multiple TV shows and commercials.  The shouting of the name has come to mean "Let's do this!" referring to foolish heroism in place of inactive analysis.

I fear that I have not done this topic justice. There is always the Wikipedia page or the one on "know your meme" One could even look at the original video, but it is pretty boring if you do not understand the delights of watching other people play video games.

There are scholarly articles on the Leeroy phenomenon, including one on the racism perhaps inherent in the way the name is said.  These are deeper and murkier waters than I can swim in based on a few minutes of research on Google, so I am going to have to leave it there.

The kids agreed with me that what Leeroy really needed was a fighting chicken. And once we had a fighting chicken, it was clear that he needed to be in a "chicken fight" pose. Apparently, no one knows what Ben/Leeroy meant when he said that at least he had chicken. Many theorized that he was cooking or ordering poultry when he should have been paying attention to his friends' strategy.

But we like the idea of a chicken with WoW weapons better.

Cargo Bike Gang

Too many characters ride in the cargo bike:
(Not one of my better drawings, but definitely the most characters on one napkin ever)

We've been taking a cargo bike to school and camp, more or less every day for five years.  During that time, the kids have gained something close to 100 pound combined, and I have aged at least 20 years.

Starting in the fall, the kids will no longer be at the same school. One will be traveling beyond reasonable biking distance to the upper east side of Manhattan. Therefore, as we finish up these last weeks of summer, we are making the daily bike trip to downtown Brooklyn for the last few times.

I have mixed feelings. The daily routine of biking has been mostly a good thing.  The excessive exercise has probably kept me from completely falling apart physically and mentally. It has certainly kept me from abandoning my misbehaving sons on a subway train. But it has always been a slightly anxiety-inducing daily grind: The weather is most often too hot or too cold. I am rarely not dangerously sleep-deprived. And many pedestrians and motorists seem to hate me for the outrageous decision to bike my kids to school and are happy to shout their opinions at me from their car windows or often, their position standing in front of us in the bike lane.

I am very pleased and overwhelmingly thankful that, besides the frequent verbal hostility, we have made it through thousands of miles without an accident or an interaction that left physical marks.

It is probably time to stop anyway, given the kids' increasing size and heft. If you are one of our few readers who is not my mom, you are probably wondering why my sons are not riding their own bikes to school by now... Well, while I had often fantasized about that happening eventually, the trip is 5 miles, mostly around the very windy Brooklyn Navy Yard, and culminates in a rather nasty stretch of riding in traffic in downtown Brooklyn. And my kids have never been very interested in self locomotion.

At any rate, since we were approaching the end of the cargo bike phase, it seemed like there should be some sort of commemorative napkin. The kids came up with an endless list of characters that have appeared on the napkins over the last five years that they thought should be riding in the bike. They argued over who should get to sit on which character's shoulders. And they berated me this morning for failing to somehow work in Doctor Who's Tardis.

I had to draw the line somewhere.

(You can see a photo of us on the bike on a rainy day in 2012 on this bicycling photography blog: gudphoto.com)

Nyan Cat, Big Sister, Big Daddy, and Coco Loco Huggable for the Last Day of Camp

Too many characters assemble for the last day of camp.

After his brother asked for the "Huggable Army," my older son had to request multiple characters himself just to keep up.  I used to have a rule that I would draw no more than one or two characters per napkin....There was a good reason for that rule....

But it was the last day of camp, so I did my best to indulge.

If you are wondering about that pop-tart cart with the rainbow up at the top: Nyan Cat's
video (link to the original video) was one of the top five most viewed videos of 2011.  It has the insipidly cute- adult infuriating quality that our older son loves. 

Judy and Yoshi from Dr. McNinja Web Comic

Last night we were catching up on "Paleontologists, Politicians and Prologue," the latest installment of Christopher Hastings' webcomic, Dr. McNinja.

The kids love the over-the-top randomness of many of the characters and events in the story.  The Doctor's secretary and driver is a large gorilla named Judy. Gordito, Dr. McNinja's 12 year old moustachioed sidekick, rides Yoshi the raptor.   When we came to an image of Judy the gorilla giving Yoshi the raptor a piggyback ride while he imitate Gordito, both kids said, "I want that on my napkin!"

I was just not capable of rendering the exaggerated facial expressions of both characters late last night.  The picture is a lot funnier in the comic.

Flying Creature from Doctor McNinja

The kids were very taken with the weirdness of this flying Dinosaur creature
in Dr. McNinja's "Paleontologists, Politicians and Prologue."  The female, eye patch and epaulet-wearing president of the United States uses it to exile her treasonous vice president to space, while she and Dr. McNinja ride in its mouth.

Interest was expressed in having this creature on a napkin. By the cold light of the morning, it was clear that my rendition was more lame than fantastically weird. Too much pink and purple too....

Battle Bears Coco Loco Huggable

Any picture can be improved by adding a cool explosion.

My older son told me yesterday, "please no more Star Wars and dinosaurs napkins!"  He said, "I know they are good drawings, but I don't want any more!" I did note the compliment buried in there. But I am aware that the kids are always happier when I draw cartoon characters exactly the way that they look on the TV show or the video game.

The "Coco Loco" is one of the Battle Bears "skins" for the Huggable. I drew it just the way it looks on the Battle Bears Wiki.

I did nonetheless indulge in some creative license with the background explosion.