Sometimes a speeder just isn’t a reliable form of transportation.  In which case using indigenous creatures suitable for riding is the preferred alternative.  Here MM has found some sort of double toed ungulate that seems to be part fungus and part slug.

I liked Cars. I grew up in AZ and am very familiar with small towns strung along old highways. It struck a chord with me, and left a good message: Slow down, look around, and enjoy life for a moment. However, every other Pixar movie took either a living creature and anthropomorphized it (bugs, fish, monsters, rats) or in the case of Toy Story took inanimate objects and bought them to life, but did so with in the realm of our world. Cars is the only movie they’ve done where they’ve extricated the experience from our world and put it somewhere else completely. And that leads me to the one thing that didn’t sit well with me: the strange machine/flesh hybrids Pixar came up with to populate this world. It’s as if a mad scientist enamored with automobiles terraformed Mars and furnished it with cyborg vehicles with engines of steel and minds of flesh. You have these cars, but with actual fleshy eyes, with irises, and mouths of teeth and tongues. Where does the machine end and the flesh begin? So, to make everything piece together a little better in my head I drew up what I think the internal structures of Lightning McQueen might look like:

Actually, that mad scientist idea might be a good premise for Cars II. Lightning discovers that they’re all created on a whim by some wacko genius as toys for his own amusement.

Another Missile Mouse drawing.  I’m going to have to start coloring these at some point.

Lately, I’ve been extremely pleased with a few internet applications that have streamlined and (dare I say) enriched my life. So, yesterday I added a little section on the sidebar there called “internet stuff” as a spot to deposit all these little internet gems I come across in my daily cybertravels. I’m usually johnny-come-lately with these kind of things, so I imagine most of you are pretty familiar with them. However, if you’ve been living under an eRock I’ll tell you a little about them.

Google Reader – A pretty darn good RSS tool. I like the share feature in which I can click the “share” button and add favorite blog posts I come across to my “Shared Items” page.

Twitter – They call it micro blogging. You can only post something like a 130 characters per post. Interesting to read people’s little day-to-day doings and thoughts.

del.icio.us – Have your favorite links with you were ever you go. If I come across something really cool on the internet I tag it and save it here. You can keep those links private or share them with all the world. I need to refine my tagging system, but you get a pretty good idea of what’s what on that page.

That’s it for now. I’m also really digging facebook. Been able to find a lot of old friends lost through the ages.

You’ve probably already heard about the Totoro Forest Project.  This is my contribution.  Below you can see the progression from initial sketches and ideas to the finished design.  It was fun, but I really didn’t have time to do it, so I think the end product suffered a little from that.