The guild crew and I stayed up ridiculously late last night playing WoW so we could see a major event centered around something called the Gates of Ahn’ Qiraj. The server I play on was the first one in the world (out of the game’s 5 and a half million player base) to finish the gate opening quests.

Using Fraps I was able to get some decent footage of the event despite 7 server crashes and extremely bad frame rates at some points because of the thousands of players flooding towards specific locations to check it all out.

Here’s the video hosted on Filefront
Here’s the video hosted on Warcraft Movies
Here’s the video hosted at Google Video

…and now the event and my video has been Slashdotted.

Crazy.

I’m really glad I added in the Makeshift Miracle url at the ass end of the video as a free plug for my website. Looks like tens of thousands will be seeing that video today so hopefully some will trickle towards the site and enjoy it. 🙂

Go Wolves of Azeroth!

PS: Oh yeah, I’m playing World of Warcraft. I’ve never mentioned that here on my livejournal before. 😛

Not having cable to watch TV anymore can be quite liberating. Besides, any really good content will be available on DVD or online eventually.

Even if that content is really cool ads, like this one for a new TV.

What’s even more impressive/amusing is that they didn’t use any CG effects for it – just 200,000+ super bouncy balls down a San Francisco street.

The song used for it is quite calming and nice as well. Calming on a day like today is a big bonus 🙂

At the school… class is in about 10 minutes.

You know you’re tired when you wake up, hit the snooze button to get another 10 minutes of sleep and then proceed to have a full blown deep sleep dream in those 10 minutes before being bolted awake by the alarm again.

Moving boxes at Udon, moving furniture yesterday at the school. My body is now taking its revenge upon me.

Also, how is it possible that people can tell me this morning:

“You don’t look like you’re doing too well. Are you eating well?”

“I’m always amazed that you have so much energy early in the morning.”

They can’t all be right. Some of that stuff is completely opposite. So strange.

Also, breakfast of choice for me here at the school the last two days has been dipping a cheese croissant into scalding Tim Horton’s hot chocolate, then drinking the cooled down hot chocolate remains after the croissant is done. It tastes better than it sounds, really.

It seems a whole pile of web artists are sketching Batgirl and posting them in their Livejournals for no apparent reason… lots of fun pics though. Check my Friends list for several. Here’s my 15 minute doodley:

For some reason I like that her bat head points are bending at the top. 🙂

Okay, back to work for meeeee!

EDIT: Whoah, the Batgirl meme’s gone crazy… apparently there’s more than 300 Batgirl pics now and more coming! It’s created quite a bit of traffic on people’s LJ’s too. Looks like I’ve gained 10-20 new Friends watching my journal. Very cool. I wonder if this will morph into more sketch threads of superheroes. Heh.

For new people just coming here for the first time, my name’s Jim Zubkavich. I’m a project manager and illustrator at Udon, plugging away on various art stuff for comics, RPGs and video game stuff. When I’m not doing that stuff, I teach part time at Seneca College in their Classical Animation program. Before all that, I was a web comic guy who created a story called The Makeshift Miracle. That’s the quick intro.

Busy times. Thanks for coming by. I hope you add me to your LJ list and enjoy my work and rambling stories.

EDIT 2: Scanning over the massive Batgirl list can be very daunting. Some are awesome, some are little more than doodles done with the mouse, some are quite tasteless, some aren’t even drawings. It’s a very strange cross section of skills and methods. The whole thing’s become unwieldly in its strange rambling internet scope, which is too bad because people may miss some really cool ones.

Below are my current favorites, after looking at ALL the crazy entries so far:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/aves_ives/145862.html
http://www.livejournal.com/users/wogs/617454.html
http://www.livejournal.com/users/bettinamarie/9636.html
http://www.livejournal.com/users/bangalores/13754.html
http://www.livejournal.com/users/pyawakit/339.html

It’s 1am and I’ve been feeling listless and out of sorts… again.

Late at night, restless, I sat in bed and read Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Lost At Sea one more time.

Damn. Love that book.

If I can create something that works as well as that does or evokes real thoughts and feelings the way it does, I’ll have something creatively rich and worthwhile.

“Grass looks nicer from the other side, you know? Grass where you’re standing looks like dirt with green hair.”

I’ve got a new bi-weekly column starting on Newsarama all about breaking in to the comic industry. Y’know, because I have nothing else to do 😛

One Step: Launch.

Click the link, check it out and give me your feedback here, there and everywhere. Pass it around and let other people who could use the info know that it’s there.