Migration

The front page has been migrated to the new system, with some slight changes in design as a result. Currently, the other pages link to the old content, where the front page still exists as a mirror, but I intend to migrate that content as well, reorganised and better streamlined. I also plan to add some new offerings as time allows.

One of them is fixed.

The Pink Lemonade production diary is now fixed and up and running again, with the improvements that come with the Blogger features that were never available to FTP users. This news page is next to be migrated, though since it's my home page it may require a bit more work.

Change is in the air

Blogger, which I've been using for years to post these news updates on this site, has recently announced that they're shutting down their FTP publishing, which is what I've been using here and on most of my other blogs.

This means I'll have to reformat things around here to work with the Blogspot system before May 1, a task which will be made easier by the fact that I've already migrated a couple of my blogs over to that system already, such as Rants in my Pants (my personal blog). I've been working on migrating the Pink Lemonade production diary there, as well, and that will be done before this news page is. Might be about time for a little redesign here as well.

The good thing about this forced migration is that I'll be able to use some of the more useful Blogspot widgets here and there, making navigation and tag searching easier, and probably providing an alternative progress gauge for the production diary that would be better than the little Flash chart I'd been using. I can also add more options to track the progress using whatever news aggregators you may prefer.

In addition to this, the gallery that I had been using to display some of the art here has gone under, and will not be returning, as far as I understand. Therefore, I've begun to explore my options over at Deviant Art, where I now have a skeleton gallery. Again, it'll probably be better and more flexible than the galleries I have hand-coded here on this site, so I expect I'll be shutting down those old pages once I've migrated the art over there.

So, all in all, change is coming, but perhaps it's change for the better.

Fixing broken bits

Some things are still messed up both here and on the Pink Lemonade site, notably the production diary there and the header graphic here. I am aware of those problems and will be fixing them as I'm able to do so.

Also, the anniversary animations shown below are now available in higher resolution on Youtube, replacing the smaller ones from Revver.

• Part 1: Ariel's High Sorcery
• Part 2: Daydream: What To Do? (with the Master and the cat)
• Part 3: Epilogue (with Ariel and Faen)

There have been other developments in this time as well, of course, but nothing I think would be relevant to the interests of this news feed.

News in brief

Currently I'm in the middle of two commissioned projects: A TV commercial for Gladiator Insurance, and a movie trailer type ad for a novel about Crisis of Felarya. I'll show clips when I can.

Drowtales 6th anniversary animation all complete

This year's anniversary animation is up. I'm very happy with these, and I consider them to be some of my best work ever. Check it out!

Revver Item trailer

And here's the The Item trailer.

Contest entry

For fun and practise, I did this very short animation for a small contest. I call it "How Not to Pass Through Airport Security: Righteous Indignation", in keeping with my more recent propensity for long titles. The audio is from the movie Penn & Teller Get Killed. (I recommend clicking that little "full screen" button for it.)

Oh, and the right-justification of the video with word-wrap is an experiment on my part, to see if it looks better than just having the video take up the entire horizontal space.

Better trailer (or, Revver wins over YouTube)

Okay, forget YouTube. I've replaced the Apprentice embedded trailer (on the Apprentice page) from YouTube with an embedded trailer from Revver. Bigger video size (480x360 on Revver vs 320x240 on YouTube) and much, much better compression quality, and a great fullscreen mode. Oh, and the ability to select the still image that shows before you click play, which YouTube doesn't offer. Compare for yourself:

   

Notice the fuzziness and general lack of detail in the YouTube version in comparison, as well as the bad compression squares on any scene change. I'll do the same with the other trailers as I have time.

Current developments

For the past few months I've been working full time on various commercial projects for hire -- commercials (view here, the two 2D animations, not the 3D one), web stuff, and more recently a web series called Cheap Secrets. I've been learning new software, and making new breakthroughs and developments in my methods. Upcoming work includes more Cheap Secrets, another Drowtales anniversary animation, and a contest entry, not to mention the ever-present Pink Lemonade.

I've also put up the older Item and Apprentice trailers onto Youtube, just to add a viewing option to the venerable old AVI and MPEG trailers that have been on this site. I'll probably add Google Video later, since it has better video quality.

Dating game

New subscription-based dating game, $5 for a month of weekly updates. Partially-animated as can be seen in the demo online here: Demonic Courtship Join in to date any character in the Drowtales universe!

New animation online!

Drowtales 4th birthday animation (not the same one as in the Picture Post box at the moment -- that's the 3rd birthday animation).

Edit: Well! Looks like it got #1 Daily Feature there. That's a first, for me! Previously, the highest I've gotten was Daily 2nd place.  

Edit2: Today the animation got placed on the front page of Newgrounds. Another honour! Welcome to visitors from there. Check the picture post box on the right for a couple of animations that are not available on Newgrounds.

How nice

Looks like my domain registrar finally woke up again, after what, 3 days? That's it. No more. I'm switching to GoDaddy. Already switched the Pink Lemonade domains, and that's why those were online when this one was down. You, the viewer, will see no difference except that the site won't be down for days at a time for no bloody reason, and e-mail won't get lost or delayed anymore, and I won't have to deal with rude, unhelpful tech support that can't even be contacted in person anymore. Goodbye Discount Domain Registry. Ah yes, in happier news, I completed another paying job, a Batman-style cartoon commercial for a bail bond company in California thanx to RCA Media at the Red Rock Media Centre, where I used to work back there. It's some of my better work, but I'll have to see if they mind me putting it online here, after they finished adding the music and sound effects. This job leads immediately into the next one for Drowtales, which will be online around tax day.

New animation

This was finished a while ago, but for visitors who did not see it elsewhere, It's the Non-Canonical Joke Minute! Newgrounds visitors looking for more information specifically on Pink Lemonade, click here.

Cons, cons, cons

Got 3 cons on 3 consecutive weekends to attend. Call me crazy (or at least a little "touched")! I'm a guest at Oni-con in Houston, AnimeUSA in Tyson's Corner, and Nekocon in Chesapeake. I should be easy to find, so come say hello or something else!

New stuff

Okay, I've just about got all the new features running as I want them. On the PL production diary I mentioned that I'd been busy with several paying animation jobs -- three of them since the last time I updated here. Very exhausting. Anyway, the "comments" feature seems to be working smoothly, and I've just set up the "picture posts" feature in the upper right. Seems to be working fine as well, but if there are any troubles, please comment here and tell me about them. I've started it out with a couple of wallpapers from the PL site, and the two recent Drowtales animations, as well as ye olde Cutethulhu for good measure. I'll add new stuff as it's completed. And the snowman has finally melted. I had some code in place that was supposed to change the graphic automatically to fit the seasons, but it wasn't working.

That's a very hardy snowman.

Testing new "comment" feature...

Latest animation project completed and online.

The Drowtales animation is now online. Enjoy! There's also a forum thread to comment on this animation.

It's all up again...has been for a while, actually. At the moment, I'm just doing the final editing work on the new Drowtales anniversary animation, which will be showing on drowtales.com in a few days. Surprise!

Jeez S. Keerist.

I don't know what was wrong with the registrar, but they had the site down and e-mail bouncing since Thursday, with no explanation, nor estimate of when it would be fixed. Looks like it's finally fixed. However, pinklemonadeanime.com will probably be down a little longer until the new server info propagates. In the meantime, use pinklemonade.org.