• October 23rd:

HA! It's finally DONE! Almost a year late but... yeah.

So this is it, my big idea! My secret project (well one of them)! So what it? Well as I've mentioned before, the idea behind the original Poisoned Minds site was to have SSDD run twice a week and I make animations the rest of the week. But because there was no deadline for these animations and games, unlike the strip they never got finished. One of the main problems I had was that I bore easily. I would start projects with the best intentions, spend HOURS on it, get near the end... then completely lose interest in it and let it rot on my hard drive.

So I pretty much gave up on the animation side of things and concentrated on daily output of strips. All was good because given a more tight schedule, I learned to manage time a bit better. I'm still crap, but better then I was.

Then I noticed the new fad of Flash loops and I thought “I can do that!” Sadly, a lot of other people thought the same, and a lot of cheap imitations by people who thought they could steal animated gifs from 4chan and music loops from Your the Man Now Dog and WIN TEH INTERNETS! Now I didn't want to do that, but I liked the idea. Then Dave Kelly for awhile before being snapped up by Lowtax, ran animated gifs on a site powered by the Keenspot system. So it was like a comic site, but with animations. Small, bite sized projects, using an existing system, and with that all important deadline that would get me to pull my thumb out! Almost perfect. Now I thought, “hey, mixing music in there and maybe some interactivity would be pretty awesome too!” So I thought I would take Flash loops with my own content and put them in the webcomic format like Dave Kelly...

Hey, I never said I was original.

First of all, I wanted to see if I could do it, so last Christmas I set myself a “little” challenge. To see if I could do it, I did little animations for the 24 days of advent. Some where misses, but there where a lot of hits too. In short, I could do it. Then the project kinda faltered. I always had something else to do first and my request for the Keenspot system to be upgraded to handle SWF files failed due to technical details (the site is admittedly a bit of a kludge) and blah, blah, blah...

Well, it's done now. The site was going to have an industrial look at first, but then I figured that I want to keep it reasonably simple if I'm going to run Flash on it, so I went for a standard corporate fare. Sure it looks likes I stole it out of Steve Job's dustbin, but I'm proud of it. I battled to get it to work in IE long enough so I hope you like it too.

Well I have the site, the software and hardware tools, so there's now no reason other then my procrastination from stopping me making something on a regular bases. I'm not sure yet how many times I can update this site, but I'm aiming for at LEAST twice a week.

Enjoy!

-Al