My latest works for Dog Soul are two illustrations for their folkloric series: an expansion to “Sahasra,” their Indian-theme line.

The first picture is the city of Kishkinda, a city in an underground cavern inhabited by a race of monkey people. The second image is The Heron & Lotus Tavern, owned by one of the monkey people.

I’ve been working on this for a little while now, in my spare time between d20 illustrations and work at the JASGP. This piece was done for the Cherry Blossom Festival, which I’ve been working pretty hard on so hopefully I can do something with this image. I’ve ordered a ton of prints (holy crap I’ve spent a lot of money on this painting!) and I’m planning to sell them throughout the festival. I really hope I can sell most of them at the festival, but I really don’t know. I’ve never done this sort of thing before. So wish me luck!

The image is sort of a parody/homage to one of Hokusai’s woodblock print series, 100 Famous Views of Edo (名所江戸百景). If you do an image search for 隅田川水神の森真崎, you’ll find the print on which I based my painting.

Don’t forget that today, 3/14, at 1:59 PM, we celebrate Pi day! Here are some things you can do to enjoy this festival:

1. Create some pi ambiance. Just like people display a tree and mistletoe, wear Christmas gear, and sing Christmas songs around Christmas, there is a lot of room for making the environment around you reminiscent of pi. Probably the favorite of most is to wear a pi t-shirt. This idea can be taken further to include pi jewelry (maybe a necklace whose beads represent the numbers in pi), a pi mug or clock, or other pi paraphernalia. Beyond just apparel, though, make your computer wallpaper into something related to pi, change your ringtone either to actual “pi music” or to a song that reminds you of the famous irrational number (“American Pie”, for example).

2. Convert things into pi. This step is absolutely necessary for two reasons: To utterly confuse people who have no idea what you are talking about (thus opening the door for enlightenment) and to have fun seeing how many things can be referenced with pi. Consider two approaches:

* Convert naturally circular things into radians like the hours on the clock. Instead of it being 3 o’clock, now it’s Pi/2 o’clock. Or, instead of it being 3 o’clock, convert the inclination of the sun into radians and describe that as the time.

* Simply use 3.14 as a unit of measure. Instead of being 31 years old, you are 9pi years old (approaching your 10th birthday). With this same approach, you can find out your next pi birthday (don’t forget to celebrate it when it comes!).

3. Play pi games and make strange mathematical endeavors. These are in the same step because many math nerds consider them the same thing. There are plenty of traditional games that are appropriate on Pi Day, like a pinata, a pie-eating contest, etc. Of course, being nerds, there are more intriguing things to do like writing a pi-ku or pi-em, holding a pi memorization or recitation contest, discussing different ways to derive pi, seeing who can write pi in the most noticeable (though legal) place on campus, at work, etc., calculate the average error experienced when using 3.14 as an approximation, finding your name, birthday, ATM pin, etc. in pi, finding pi in pi, or discussing what things would be like without pi (the earth being a square and so on). This list could literally go on and on; hopefully this is enough to give you ideas of your own.

4. Eat pi foods. Many creative ways exist to do this. First, there’s the punny approach, like eating pinapple or pine nuts and drinking pina coladas or pineapple juice. Second, there’s the shape approach, like making cookies or pancakes shaped like pi or making a pie with a pi cut out of the center of the crust. Of course, whatever you do, Pi Day is simply incomplete without eating pie, even if you don’t feel artistic enough to carve the pi symbol out of the top.

5. Help the tradition continue. Don’t let this be a one time thing–you owe it to pi to celebrate again and again. Set the date for next year and maybe create a pi club or website in the process. Celebrating Pi Day is just as easy as… pi. (Sigh.)

In honor of Mars Orbiter’s descent into orbit around Mars:

Today a mysterious object began appearing in our sky. The population panicked after they heard rumors saying that the object came from the evil blue planet. To calm the population, K'Breel, speaker for the council of Elders, said:

"We are not to worry. Let us remember that our cloaking technology will keep us safe from being noticed by the inhabitants of the evil blue planet. Our scientists are studying the artificial satellite and have concluded that it is a very primitive technology. We are not to fear. Besides, our plan to destroy the evil blue planet have not been hindered in any way."

When someone asked why this satellite couldn't be destroyed as the other two alien satellites that were sent by the blue planet inhabitants, K'Breel ordered the traitor's immediate execution. This was the first case of someone being executed for stripping the word "evil" from the phrase "evil blue planet", according to the new law.

Taken from Spy der Mann on Slashdot. (Sorry for stealing your post!)

I just came across the coolest NES Emulator ever! It’s called UberNES (http://www.ubernes.com). What makes this the coolest NES Emulator ever, you ask? For one, it automatically reads info from the ROM and places it in a database, so you don’t have to go through the trouble of renaming all the ROMs you download just to know what the hell you’re looking at. This makes it possible to download those big zip files full of ROMs without getting too confused over what you have. It also has a nice box art viewer so you can visually choose what game to play. It records a lot of stats such as high scores, time played, most played, and has built in video/audio recording abilities. Game genie is built in, too. Most impressively, it’s got an online database that automatically updates your high scores with everyone else using UberNES. The database gives you GameGenie codes, global high scores, globally most played, and even an online database of NES movies made by other people that you can watch. Best of all, you don’t have to register to use the online stuff, and you don’t have to install anything into Windows… just run the single-file program.

Unfortunately it’s Windows only… But aside from that minor setback, this is the coolest emu I’ve ever seen!