Chances are I'm going to be drawing/scanning all of these myself, but it's time to start working on Anime Press Your Luck 3.0, and that means I need Whammies! Fanartists, get ready to scribble!

What I'm looking for:

Chibi- or parody-style fanart of anime characters drawn to resemble the little red guys you can sorta see in this picture.

The whammies are red in color, wear a yellow mask, have little horns and pointy ears, beady eyes, and wear a yellow cape. They also have a big ¥ symbol on their chest when they're not wearing any particular costume.

They do stuff like this.

Some ideas to get you going:

Afro Samurai whammy slicing through the contestant's scoreboard
Aria whammy springing a leak in their boat
Bleach - leekspin whammy
CLANNAD - Kyou whammy throwing a dictionary
Death Note - Light whammy
Dragonball Z - Goku Kame-hame-ha ing your money away
FMA - Anything
Negima - Negi using his staff to magick away your money
Evangelion - Shinji "running away" with your money
Naruto - Any of the ninja doing their hand jive
Pokemon - Ash whammy throwing a pokeball, Big Ugly Thing pops out and eats him
Sailor Moon - Chibi-Usa whammy cries away all your money
Strike Witches - Whammy flies over and divebombs your score
Katamari Whammy - Whammy rolls big katamari ball over your scoreboard, wiping out your score

Any other ideas you can come up with; these are the result of fifteen minutes' worth of brainstorming.

What it entails:

Three to four frames' worth of drawings. For example, the Light whammy would be sitting at a desk, scribbling away in his death note (I'd then zoom to a close-up of the note, where he's writing "YOUR MONEY.").

I will most likely wind up drawing these guys (badly) myself, since I can't offer any sort of compensation other than heartfelt thanks and hey, want to have some fun being a part of a game show? But if anyone on here would like to give it a go and wind up in the credits of any and all Youtube videos made from the footage we shoot from APYL here on out, give it a go!

Con's in early October, and would like to have the program completely wrapped up by end of September. Whammies will be the last thing to go in.

Pencil-sketches and rough stuff is fine...I'll be scanning them into Flash and drawing over them to make the actual animation. Badly-drawn is fine, too, so long as the character is recognizable!

Fire away if any of you would like to give it a try, and thanks for checking the post out!

ZOMG CLANNAD Kyou arc OAV was full of DELICIOUS KYOU.

So now that K-On is over I find myself torn between well...all of the girls. Each one has their own little bit of awesome that makes me moe for them. It's odd; this is probably the first show where there wasn't one main character who I shrugged off.

If I were to rank them:

1) Mugi (I like rich girls who play down the whole being rich thing and who just want to be normal, while still maintaing a certain naiveté. cough elisel cough, this character is definitely how I'd picture you if you were 16 and Japanese.)
2) Azu-nyan (Twin tail tsundere! topleka must cosplay!)
3) Yui (Ultimate cheerful idiot!)
4) Mio (Her shyness got a little tiresome towards the end as she was overtaken by Azu-nyan)
5) Ritsu (Last but certainly not least, especially in the last episode!)

Honorable mention: Ui and Sawa-chan-sensei!

There were just so many appealing characters in this show. Way to go, guys. I still only gave the show an eight out of ten, though. I'll still be rewatching this like a mofo.

Meanwhile, the fourth OAV of Higurashi came out, ending an interesting arc with WALL OF TEXT. After watching it, about the only response I could come up with was: "Indeed." All that's left is the Daybreak OVA, and then that's it for these characters. Meanwhile, gearing up ever so much for Umineko. Can't wait to actually be able to babble insanely about it with narugami and other fans. (Keep them spoiler tags up, please!)

Also looking forward to the next cours of Saki and Cross Game. Now that I understand a hell of a lot more about mahjong, Saki is equal parts moe and sports for me, something Shion no Ou never quite accomplished because I just never got interested in shogi. I loved that show to death, though. And Cross Game? Can't say enough good things about it. It's fairly predictable how it'll end up, but if there are going to be more episodes like the most recent one, I'm totally going to enjoy the ride. Baseball + tsundere = ultimate win.

I kind of lost interest in the other shows I'd been following (except Higashi no Eden, which I completed and liked, despite not having much to say about it). I've been dividing equal time between my XBox and anime, and XBox has won over watching more Hatsukoi, Basquash! or Shangri-La.

I fixed the issue. Would you believe it's because I didn't have QuickTime installed on this machine? Found an online resource that explained what caused the error message I was getting, I hopped over to Apple, grabbed QuickTime, reinstalled Flash, and boom diggity, we are back in business, BABY.

Adobe Flash CS4 crashes every time I try to import sound effects. So we won't be programming anything, or working on game shows any more. I have no patience for computers when it's the fault of the software and not my programming. So there you go. No game shows for you.

Been a while since I updated here.

The sixth anniversary of ASK-C, the local anime club that's not affiliated with any kind of school and whose membership is mostly people around my age or older, was a lot of fun. It was nice to nerd it up with people outside of a convention situation. Of course, I did get to show a bunch of my old game show stuff, and the people there loved it. They're trying to rope me into Naka-con. I went ahead and downloaded Flash again and am looking at it as a "wait-and-see" kind of situation. Naka-con already has an established game show staff and I certainly wouldn't want to step on any toes there, plus I still don't know whether or not I really want to jump into a convention where there will be so damn many kiddos running around.

If I do go to cons again, it'll be small ones. The big ones have all sold their souls to the musical guests, and I just can't compete with that. I was most successful with conventions with a smaller audience, and that'll be where I decide to go if I decide to go anywhere at all.

The following was cut-and-pasted from Facebook:

On Thursday I began laying the foundation for a new Flash program that'll be the game board for Anime All-Star Blitz, the first game I'm working on for a potential comeback to the anime convention scene in 2010. Not much work so far, but it's the first programming I've done in about two years, so it's a start.

I'm basically trying to fill every possible niche for guest games. I can do Squares if a con is rambunctious enough to have nine guests in the same place at the same time, but more realistically I have Battlestars for 6 guests, and now All-Star Blitz for 4 guests. I have a feeling if I come back and do smaller cons, 4 guests is a good target to have for shows involving guests.

I'd like to have ten shows more or less ready to roll and a bank of questions set by the beginning of the year, but I think that's rather ambitious. I also think Press Your Luck needs a Whammy overhaul. Maybe I'll be luckier finding people willing to draw Whammies than I was after the original 10 were commissioned.

The rotation I'd like to see? All-Star Blitz, Battlestars, Password, Match Game, Tic Tac Dough, Joker's Wild, Blockbusters, Press Your Luck, Now You See It, Chain Reaction, Pyramid, Jeopardy! Okay, that's twelve shows. I'm a lying liar that lies.

*****

Anyway, would I do Tekkoshocon again? Probably not. It's gotten big enough to where my style of programming really doesn't fit anymore as a guest, and as a panelist or staffer I can't afford the cost of bringing myself in and putting myself up. If I were to ever come back, it would be strictly as an attendee, and even then I probably would stick to something more local if I got the urge to go to a con. Now that I have a car there are several possibilities for cons I can drive to, from Texas to Iowa realistically.

Work continues to be stressful due to lack of staffing, and W*M is finally starting to feel the sting of the economic downturn. We're having to cut hours across the board for at least the next two months since at the moment we're going up against the numbers from last year before the new store opened fifteen minutes away. The fifteen to twenty bucks a paycheck that's going to cost me will hurt a little, so I'm definitely grateful that I'm having a great time lately on CardShark. Had my second-best week ever last week (and I've been a member there for almost six years). That plus the bonus we just got from work will be put straight into savings and paying the credit card back down. I did splurge a little bit, though...picked up another external hard drive, a webcam, and the sound recording software I use to get the sound bites for my game show software. If I can ever manage to clean up my apartment I might try a video blog or two. Maybe.

I am still hopelessly addicted to Pokemon. I am playing three games right now, and they're ALL POKEMON: Platinum, Sapphire and Colosseum. At least I'm finally putting sorakirei's Gamecube to work. The batteries I picked up for my Wavebird controller are still good...man, I love Nintendo.

So for those of you who are on the other networks, you can find me by my LJ name on Facebook and @DasGreggo on Twitter. I update those far more often than the old LJ at this point, unless I have a particularly large brain dump to leave to the masses.

Enjoy your weekend.

With a couple more series yet to watch the first eps of, my lineup for the anime spring season is fairly robust. (ETA: ZOMG grammar)

Carryovers from last season: Suzumiya Haruhi-chan no Yuuutsu, Nyoro~n Churuya-san

Watching for sure: Basquash!, Cross Game, Eden of the East, K-ON!, Natsu no Arashi!, Saki

Watching for now: Asura Cryin', Hatsukoi Limited, Ristorante Paradiso, Shangri-La

Still to watch: Tears to Tiara, Tayutama, Valkyria Chronicles

Need to finish: Minami-ke Okaeri

Backlog? What is this thing called backlog?

I purchased a video capture device over the weekend. Once it arrives, expect to see youtube videos of some of my *really* old game shows. 2000-2001 era Match Games, the first ever Anime Press Your Luck, and if I can find someone with an 8mm camera, some Fanboy Feud and stuff from Ushicons past.

Plus the greatest ¥25,000 Pyramid ever played despite us not catching the most illegal winners' circle clue ever from a Ms. Tiffany Grant.

I'm on Twitter now. DasGreggo. Add me if you like. :D

Here we go!
( Bring on the brackets! )
That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Bring on the madness!

So far this year I have purchased two games.

This time last year? Between Goozex, eBay and Gamestop, I had purchased close to 50.

I *think* I've figured out where I spent most of my money last year. xD