Oh, I exaggerate for comedic effect. I watch the The City voluntarily. I mean, it's the stupidest show ever. But, yes, voluntarily.

So, I had a birthday party on Friday. It must have been fun, because as we were going through the photos tonight there were some things that I didn't remember happening. Good times. The things I do remember happening include:

Getting three pies from Hoosier Mama Pie Company. I love their motto -- "Keep Your Fork, There's Pie!" And I love their pies. We got an apple, a key lime, and a peanut butter. I think my favorite was the apple, but they were all good. (The pizzas were from Apart Pizza, who we also heartily recommend.)

Making all my friends do shots of Malört. My goodness, it's amazing that my friends still speak to me (and the photos make my party look a little more grim than it really was). We went through most of a bottle at the party.

I set out a pile of paper and pens and asked my guests to draw a cartoon of me. A bunch of people drew a bunch of great cartoons (you can see them at the end of this set). They're all awesome, but I want to point out the Coraline-inspired Other Fuzzy, Shauna's comic book, and me bopping everyone on the head with Malört.

In a number of the cartoons, I'm wearing a number 7 football jersey. That's because, as pictured above, Shaun gave me a number 7 Pittsburgh Steelers jersey (that is, quarterback Ben Roethlisberger) right at the start of the party. Shaun didn't give the jersey because I'm any sort of fan of the Steelers or Mr. Roethlisberger. It's because…

So during the Super Bowl party we had at Shaun's house a couple of people noted that Ben Roethlisberger looked a bit like me (like my "giant, bloated cousin" someone said). I didn't see him much in the game without his helmet on, so I wasn't sure what he really looked like, but whatever. The day after the game, I was looking at my Flickr stats (as one does) and noticed that a random picture had gotten 243 views the day before. Oddly, it was just the Now Me half of the Young Me, Now Me diptych I did last year -- the photos pick up views every now and then, but usually as a pair. I followed the referring stats and found that all the hits were coming from a Cleveland Browns fan forum where 'Chase1996' had posted that:

I was using StumbleUpon this evening (great plug in BTW) when I Stumbled on this Flickr page....is it me, or does he look remarkably like Ben Roethlisberger?

Browse through his photostream...several pics of him that I think pass for Ben....anyone else agree?

'cdunfee1289' thought that it was a good enough likeness that it deserved some Photoshopping:

And that is why Shaun thought I needed a #7 Steelers jersey.

I was inspired by Shauna's versions of Erica and myself and spent some time doodling up these guys. I should probably just copy Shauna's drawings and be done with it.

My birthday party was a ton of fun. I probably can't do that sort of thing more than once a year, now that I'm an old, old man, because I was definitely dragging the next day.

At my party birthday, I set out a pile of paper and pens and asked people to draw a cartoon of me. To set the bar low, I drew this one. (I'll post the cartoons in a second here.)

Coyote and Raven return.

Coyote and Raven are two little characters I've been drawing for years. Not with any consistency, as these four panels show. And I've already gone meta, just two days in.

So now that I'm done with taking a year's worth of photos of myself, I thought I'd stretch a different artistic muscle for the next year. I love cartooning, but I'm pretty terrible at drawing, so drawing at least a cartoon a day for a year… well, I can't get any worse at least.

And so what a delightful coincidence this morning to read an invite from Lore Sjöberg to add characters to the Jug Sauce Elite. Done and done -- day one is checked off. This cartooning train is off to the races. (Do trains race? Who cares -- that'll be day two!)

It's my birthday and I'm having a party!

Friday, Feb 6, 2009*. 7 pm til late.

There will be (good) pizza and beer and wine and Malört and whatever other drinks we dig out of the liquor cabinet. And pie. And maybe we'll play some board games or I'll make everyone draw a cartoon of me or something weird like that. Or you can just swing in and tell me how awesome I am.

We have two cats, so if you're allergic stock up on the Claritin (tm).

It's at our house, way up in the frozen north. I love all of you out on the internet, but, um, yeah, I'm not putting my address here. Shoot me an email if you can't remember where I live.

It's an open invite, so if you're talking to someone and say "Are you going to Fuzzy's party?" and they'll all like "What party?" and you're like "Awk-werd." you can just say "oh, you must not have read that blog post -- you're totally invited." and they'll say "Awesome!"

* I know some people care -- my actual birthday is Tuesday, February 3.

Voodoo Vince is a fun little platformer set in a cartoony New Orleans. The titular character is a voodoo doll, trying to rescue his creator from a kidnapper who wants her "voodoo dust power". The central conceit of the game is supposed to be that since you're a voodoo doll damage to you actually hurts your enemies. But in practice, you can be damaged and the self-damage voodoo power is really just a special area attack, albeit accompanied by clever little animations of Vince being damaged by falling cows, passing mafia cars, and so on. The real stars of the game are the fun environments, which all have clever details like the labeling of storage crates or interesting posters, and the great background music. The music has even been released on CD and I'm tempted to pick up a copy.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Courtesy of the Internet Archive, some classic (in the sense of old) Christmas cartoons:

Also at the archive, The Jack Benny Christmas Show and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.

Noah did sketches of all the DADAs from Schmückt der Hallen -- I'd call them caricatures, but they're really almost like character designs as if we were all going to be a Saturday morning cartoon. And wouldn't that be awesome? Here's DADA little piece of string and DADA Alvi:

You can see the whole cast at Noah's sketch blog.

The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is a sequel to the Game Cube's Wind Waker and is presented in the same super-cute cartoony style. And let's note that, indeed, there's no real innovation in game design here. You're going to be going into dungeons and solving puzzles to find 4 of this and 5 of those to assemble the thing that'll get you to there. Super-annoyingly, you also have to return to one main dungeon, the Temple of the Ocean King, about 20 times and you have to retrace your steps every time (alright, only mostly every time, but still).

But for all of that, I like the standard Zelda game play, and the use of the touch screen for controls made controlling Link more fun than ever before. I loved being able to direct the path of the boomerang by drawing on the screen.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Team Gerdes-Plus-Noah is proud to present another in our growing stable of odd little websites: Onomatopoetically.

The site was inspired by a site cartoonist Adam Koford (aka Apelad) put up -- Onomatopedia.com. On that site, Adam sells original cartoons inspired by onomatopedic words supplied by his customers. (I bought a cartoon of the word "poot".)

I like making funny sounds, so I thought it might be fun to do a similar thing with audio. The domains onomatopeia.com and onomatopoeic.com are held by a domain speculators or somesuch, but onomatopoetic is an acceptable alternate spelling and I liked the way that that it has "poetic" buried in there. Onomatopoetically describes how we're going to be saying these things and makes the domain name so long and difficult to spell that no one is ever going to be able to find the site*.

So the way it works is pretty simple. You suggest an onomatopoetic word (either a real one like "bark" or just some sort of sound spelled out) and if we like it, we'll record ourselves using it in a sentence and then post it on the site. It's likely to be pretty sporadic, so I suggest subscribing to our feed in your favorite feed reader.

* Oops.

I know you don't trust me, but the Onion AVClub gave the new Laugh-Out-Loud Cats book an A.

Through some inexplicable alchemy, cartoonist Adam Koford has turned seemingly every annoying Internet meme—from hobo worship to "I see what you did there"—into something whimsical and charming in Meet The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats, a collection of single-panel cartoons packaged to look like a old 1973 Dell paperback.

While I was off getting other people custom cartoons, Erica was conspiring behind my back to get me a custom Laugh-Out-Loud Cats!

Hopefully Andrew has the original in his hands by now, so I'm going to go ahead and post this...

Follow me, here, for a moment, as this ties together several of my areas of interest.

In 2005 John Hodgman (This American Life, The Daily Show, the PC in those Mac/PC commericials) wrote a book called The Areas of My Expertise, a fake "compendium of world knowledge". It had a long section on hobos which included a list of 700 Hobo Names, names like Boxcar Ted and Guesstimate Jones and Microfiche Roy, the Side-Scroller. As part of the promotion material for the book, Hodgman released an mp3 of himself reading the entire list while Jonathan Coulton plays guitar in the background (live, one take - fingers of steel, that man). The book, by the way, is hilarious.

Inspired by a challenge from BoingBoing, some illustrators, including Adam "Apelad" Koford, set out to illustrate each of the names. An informal group covered all the names, but eventually Koford illustrated all 789* names by himself as well.

In early 2007, the LOL Cat internet phenomenon, which had been around as "Image macros" for years, really took off. In June 2007 Koford "revealed" that his grandfather, also a cartoonist, had actually invented LOLcats with his 1912 cartoon "The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats". The cartoon was the adventures of Meowlin Q. Kitteh and his kitten friend Pip, both hobo cats. I was an instant fan -- the combination of old-tymey humor, internet jokes, and the cuteness of the cats hits some magic combination of switches in my brain. The Laugh-Out-Louds Cats are created via an interesting process -- rather than being drawn on any sort of schedule, they're drawn as people buy them. For $20, you get the orignal artwork mailed to you and Koford posts a scan to his website. It's been popular -- where even a daily comic strip would just produce 365 strips a year, the Laugh-Out-Loud cats hit number 666 (on New Year's Day 2008) after just six months. At times, Koford has also used the same model to offer custom monkeys or animals or new hobo names via his website.

Also in 2005, Erica's good friend Andrew Livingston began to play bass in the Mike Doughty Band, which he continues to do to the present day (new album out February 19!). Everyone in the band had nicknames and Andrew was named Scrappy, which was quickly shortened to Scrap. Because it's what Mike calls him onstage, a lot of people only know Andrew as "Scrap Livingston".

Which is an awesome hobo name.

So that's what we got Andrew for Christmas 2007.

The end.

*The second paperback edition of the book included bonus hobo names.

And in the same vein, Adam "Apelad" Koford has (had?) a deal where for $20 you could get an original monkey illustration to your specifications. Above is the Monkey Midget Busdriver. Monkeys are, already, smaller than the average busdriver, but I think he's even smaller than that. $20 can also get you an original Laugh Out Loud Cat cartoon, and if that's not a great deal, I don't know what is.

TMNT (2007)

I would have been impressed if this was three episodes of a Saturday morning cartoon, but it just didn't feel like it was worth a movie. Oh, and, hey, movie, we get it. "Family is important." Thanks.

And does the first "T" now stand for Twenty-something? These guys are old. Hmm... they have MySpace pages, maybe they are still teenagers.

(Anything you found amusing in this post, Erica came up with it.)

Batman Begins (2005)

After so many cartoony Batman movies, it was great to have a -- I almost said "realistic", but we are still talking about a guy in a bat suit -- thoughful one. With actual, if brief, character growth. Erica and I agree that there could have been a lot more of Bruce Wayne learning his skills. But overall, quite a good superhero movie.