We’re stuck in the grill of a blizzard, and today people are asking the groundhogs if we’ll have 6 more weeks of winter. Kinda looks like it’ll take 6 weeks to melt all this snow.

This was taken in Kennyland‘s back yard in Second Life. I still haven’t taken that Christmas tree down because I don’t have anything to replace it with yet. I figured I might as well bury it in fake snow. The ground hog will stay around for just one day.

I’m going to try to post my favorite YouTube videos on most Fridays, to provide a little more content and to make more use of my favorites list.
First, I have for you a fox playing in the snow. This guy has a LOT of videos of his pet fox. I need to use these as reference to make Kenny even more fox-like.

And second, here’s Jim Carrey imitating Vanilla Ice. That boy can dance.

Chip and Dale actually had 2 sets of actors voice them in the short “Two Chips And A Miss”. The singing voices were done by two ladies, I guess so they don’t have to distort the voices as much. Or maybe the speaking actors weren’t good singers? Here’s the two chipmunks singing at their non-sped-up speed:

Here’s a longer recording of later in the short, mostly featuring a third chipmunk, a lady singing on stage. Here, you can hear the male speaking voices at their pre-sped-up speed. Basically sounds normal, considering how fast those two characters speak.

At the end, the two try to kiss the girl, to which she ducks, and I just had to make an icon of this comedic shot which you can use wherever you want:
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I recently found a great collection of Star Trek ship models for the Blender 3D modeling program, and started playing around with the Voyager one. Then I decided to see if I could cast a shadow on the ship and the monkey head included with Blender fit the need perfectly. After all, it WAS designed to test shading and reflection settings, just like the teapot in other programs, since it can cast a shadow and reflection on itself.

I’m nowhere near being well-versed in Blender(I didn’t design either object in the scene), but this recent bit of play has helped. Before this, the only things I’ve made in Blender were a snow man and a very simple scene that was meant to get perspective right on one comic(simpler to just draw it). I had intended on using Blender for the backgrounds in the comics, but then I got on Second Life and it was at least 10x easier. Been building the backgrounds in Second Life ever since. I need to switch to a higher-quality program, though, since Second Life has lots of building limitations, is slowed by cheap broadband, and is intended to be a SOCIAL  environment. People will talk to you even if you’re in Busy mode, which I normally am.

I plan on having some 3D backgrounds set on land, and Second Life is best for flat, non-natural surfaces, so I ‘m testing out Blender and Unity3(game development program) for those. Not sure what I’ll end up using, but Blender seems more versatile, since I can render high-quality videos with that as well. On the other hand, Unity3 has a tree-making function and is designed for easy landscaping. I don’t know.

Whee!

Kennyland is still going strong(as is the Halloween attraction for some reason), but it turns out Kenny World is more space than I can currently fill, so I’ll focus on some other Second Life theme park projects while I do some more planning. I was building a 256×256 meter theme park in Second Life, and besides the roller coaster that I haven’t started building, I wound up with some spacious gaps in the design. This was a good start, though, and gave me some new sets for the comic. In fact, the comic where Kenny ran into the railing with his flying shoes used part of Kenny World for the set, as well as when Kenny tried to get Death in the pool a couple months ago. Lots of useful building done in the time I had that land.
…but the main reason was funding. I was sharing the region with some other people(I had all of a certain elevation so I wouldn’t interfere with other builds) and there were financial issues beyond the group’s control. Hopefully we can get restarted on the project later this year(maybe with a business plan?), but at the moment I’m planning on just incorporating elements from Kenny World into Kennyland because really, besides the floors, I haven’t made any more things than can already fit into Kennyland.

Having made my own TRON parody, I’m partial to other TRON parodies as well, and when you mix in a heavy dose of an iPhone app, you get my vote.

Also along the theme of mixing two things you wouldn’t normally expect, what do you get when you mix an action scifi thiller with Dora The Explorer?
………..VERY GOOD!