A video from back in the good old days, when I was still training with the parkour guys:

Cool effects done using Toon-FX toon video.

The craziest, worst incident went down last night. And since I’m lying here with a busted foot, I had plenty of time to toon it for you guys. Big thanks to Mrs. Brisby for all the pics!

I’ve been messing around with Toon Video a bit more, and I turned one of my recent comics into a mini-movie. I’m actually kinda surprised by how well the tooning software works with videos I’ve made myself.

Check out the part near the end where I’m swinging up onto a narrow platform. That’s one of my favorite ways into JoyTech.

Unfortunately, after a couple days of trying to forget about it, the question of what JoyTech is doing here in Ring City is back in my head. I’m gonna call Aurora about it right now. She’s the expert on all this emissions control stuff.

The music in the video is by Stefan Ternemar. Check out his MySpace.

So, last time I posted, the sun was coming up behind me, and I was flinging myself through my bedroom window.

I land, as planned, on my bed, but not as planned, right on top of Aurora. Luckily it’s dark, so I have time to whip off my mask and throw it into a corner piled with laundry, while she’s flailing to get out from under me.

“Nemo, get off!”

Again, I’m glad it’s dark, because I know her eyes are looking murder at me, and for one second, with the adrenaline of the chase still pumping through me, I have a crazy urge to keep her pinned under me for a second. Just to see what would happen.

But I know what would happen. Never mess with a girl that just missed her Batman fix because of you.

To appease her, I rolled to the side, hooking her legs so that she ended up on top of me. I could see her glare now as my eyes adjusted to the darkness of the room, and for a second, I thought she was going to sock me.

Let her.

I rested my arms behind my head. “Sorry about Batman.”

“Sorry?!” Furious, she pummeled my chest with both her fists. “You have no idea what I went through to do this with you!”

Me and Aurora always used to go see the new comic book movies together, but now that she’s practically married to New Guy, she has to sneak around to do stuff with me. And I knew that.

After we worked together on the animal thing, she sort of apologized for saying we couldn’t hang out anymore. She admitted that she just didn’t want New Guy to feel ‘betrayed’ by our friendship.

There were a lot of things I didn’t like about that, but I did like that Aurora could potentially be ‘betraying’ New Guy with me. It made me sound like…competition.

So this movie was supposed to be our big reconciliation hang out, and I had forgotten about it completely.

“I’m really sorry.” I moved my hands to her hips, because I wanted her to get it, that I felt bad.

“You’re a jerk.” She jumped off the bed and wandered over to my desk.

Toon-Photo was open on my computer, and she started fooling around with it disconsolately.

That’s when I knew she was going to forgive me, so I went and sat beside her and we played with the Toon-FX stuff for a bit, taking pics and tooning, just like old times.

It’s nice to have Aurora back around.

I wanted to post quickly to let you know that Toon-FX redesigned their site, and it looks freakin’ awesome. They’ve got a super easy, cool, FREE version of the toon-photo app up there that you basically HAVE TO TRY. It seems like they’re coming out with new stuff all the time these days, hope that means they’re doing gooooood.

But I’ve gotta run. So much is going on right now, it’s insane. I’ll post all about it tomorrow, for now I’ll just say everything is working out for the friends of Mrs. Brisby, thanks to someone who masquerades as a regular person, but is really a superhero – I’m sure you can guess her name.

Check this out. Toon-FX now has this app that lets you toon video! It’s super simple to just take regular video clips and turn them into sweet animations. Mrs. Brisby thinks it’s cool, anyway, which is why she agreed to star in my first tooned vid.

At some points in life, you really need a friend. Even if all they do is get you out of your own toonified head. Now I’ve got a new friend. And I’ll be the first to admit that I was feeling pretty sorry for myself in the friend department when she came along.

I think I’m going to call her Mrs. Brisby, like the mouse from The Secret of NIMH. She seems to think it’s funny. Seriously.

Mrs. Brisby is the coolest little creature ever. She’s super smart, really friendly, and, like I said, she takes pictures and send them to my cell phone.

I’m guessing that she must have been part of an experiment involving putting little cameras in rats’ brains? I didn’t know that was possible, but she is definitely, definitely the one sending the pictures. When she wants to eat something, she sends me a picture of it. When she wants to take a closer look at something she can’t get at, she does the same thing.

She took a picture of me laughing at Flight of the Conchords, and now she sends me that pic whenever she thinks something’s funny. For example – me trying to look tough. That got a big laugh.

The messed-up thing I can’t get over is the reasoning behind turning her into a super-rat. I’m guessing it was not to make her into a cool pet. I’ve found so far that when I try to talk to her, she tries to find ways to respond. But when I ask her about the lab, she turns her back on me.

The only time she’s responded so far is when I asked her about the other rats at JoyTech. Then she sent me an image of a tray full of dead rats. Then she acted really busy shredding some newspaper I put in a box for her.

Poor Mrs. Brisby.

One thing’s for sure. I can’t let the rest of those animals stay caged up at JoyTech. But I can’t just set them free, either. It’s not going to be easy for them to start new lives.

So I’ve made a decision. I’m going to tell Aurora what I’ve seen. And I’m going to ask for her help. We don’t have to be friends, but she’s got all these connections in activism communities, and I need her help. Maybe there’s some way this thing can be resolved safely, without the influence of a ‘masked adventurer.’

Funny story. Turns out that dislocating your shoulder when you’re three years old is different from dislocating it when you’re sixteen. I woke up Saturday morning and I couldn’t lift my arm to save my life.

Instead I decided to spend the weekend working on tooning. I went down to the Ruby Ridge skatepark to take pics of some guys I used to go to school with practicing tricks. I thought the setting would be perfect for toonifying.

It was pretty cool. I hadn’t seen those guys since the neighborhood got subdivided and we went to different schools. For the first time in a million years I wasn’t obsessing about Aurora, and then guess who shows up?

One second I’m chillin’ out, the next she’s sitting right beside me. Doesn’t say anything, just acts all interested in watching people skate. Conversation goes thusly:

“Hey Aurora.”

“Oh! Hey.”

“What, you sat down and didn’t notice me here?”

“No. I called your house and Jerry told me you were here.”

“So you’re suddenly talking to me again?”

“I was never not talking to you. I was working some stuff out with Kev.”

“Right. You’re just not talking to me around New Guy.”

“Don’t call him that, Nemo.”

“What? New Guy? That’s his name, isn’t it?”

“You’re so selfish! You’re the one that’s making this hard for me. I mean, Jesus Christ, Nemo, you punched him right in the face! What am I supposed to do? Defend you?”

“You’re supposed to not go out with a guy that’s the total opposite of you, thinks everything you do is stupid, and tried to physically drag you away from the protest that you organized!”

After I said that, I was sure she was going to scream her head off at me, but she just looked off at the skaters for a while.

I tried to imagine we were hanging out and everything was cool. For a second, I caught the feeling. Then she stood up.

“I just came to say I’m sorry, Nemo. We’ve been best friends forever, but I don’t see how we can hang out at school or go places together or anything anymore. I really care about Kevin, and…” she broke off so I knew she was trying not to cry. I didn’t want to look up at her though.

I kept my mouth shut, and eventually, she left. The situation sucks, but for some reason, I’m not mad. I just know I’ve got to look out for her even more now. Help her with the stuff she’s trying to do because New Guy won’t. And if he gets out of line, I’ll be there.

Okay, maybe it’s just me, but it seems like there’s an almost anti-planet-friendly hysteria building up in Ring City right now?

I don’t know if it’s because people like to argue, or because they don’t want to change their lifestyle, but more and more I’m hearing “global warming doesn’t exist,” and “there’s no proof that we created the holes in the ozone layer,” and “looking for alternative fuel sources is a waste of time.”

No kidding!

In Ring City, first it was this “recycling doesn’t work” thing, and now there’s all the trouble surrounding the JoyTech plant. All in the space of a week. WTF?

Some background: When all the towns and cities that got surrounded by the Ring Road became the Western Conurbation Area a,k.a. Ring City, there was all this green space in the middle that divided a few of the bigger cites, and only had a few small towns (or ‘neighborhoods’ as they’re now called) in it.

I live in one of those towns.

The Conurbation Council originally promised that all the green space would become protected parkland.

Then the JoyTech Global Improvement Company came to town.

They bought up a huge chunk of land between my ‘neighborhood’ and the urban center across the Blood River, and built the plant, outbuildings, and sprawling parking and warehousing areas surrounding it.

So much for green space, and so much for clean air.

The JoyTech plant belches black smoke 24/7, viololating “every CO2 emissions standards law in existence,” according to Aurora. Standards which, Jerry is quick to point out, are already pathetically low.

The point of all this is to say that Aurora has somehow miraculously mobilized this big protest, planned for tomorrow in front of the JoyTech plant, and we just found out that there’s going to be a counter-protest to protest Aurora’s protest!

They say the air quality in the area hasn’t gone down, and that the original protesters are just left-wing nutjobs that are trying to destroy the industries that built this country.

It seems like everybody is missing a simple truth here: the planet is fragile. Our ecosystem is not indestructible, and the nicer we are to it, the longer it will take care of us.

Show me all the facts and statistics in the world to prove that a problem doesn’t exist, you’ll never convince me that what we’re doing to the ecosystem is without consequence.

Anyway, we’ll see what happens tomorrow. I’ll be going as my regular self, because something tells me they’ll have some thugs on crowd control that might recognize my mask.

As usual, all the photos in this post were tooned using Toon-Photo.

Aurora finally made it over to watch the last episode of Jericho. Ever since she started dating New Guy she’s got zero time. Fine. Whatever. I just wish the night hadn’t ended with us getting in a stupid argument over the message of the show.

The plot of Jericho was simple. A company is contracted to provide support to the U.S. in the event of a nuclear attack. The company makes the attack scenario happen, takes charge of the fallout, and eventually installs itself as the new government.

Me and Aurora both agreed that based on everything we know about how contractors handle humanitarian disasters, this scenario is entirely plausible.

We started to disagree when I said that it wouldn’t really make a significant difference to how this country works if power changed hands in this way. It all comes down to the same kind of people wanting the same kind of things.

But Aurora, doing her whole goddess of the downtrodden thing, said that it did matter how it happened, that we have to believe in the goodness of people and in the potential for change that is ‘non-destructive’ (her word, not mine).

That got us on to the topic of Adrian Veidt’s scheme in The Watchmen by Alan Moore, which we both just read. It is definitely one of the greatest graphic novels of all time.

Veidt basically unleashes a horrible monster on New York, which causes the world to band together against a common enemy. Of course, Aurora thinks that no positive outcome could justify the death and destruction caused by Veidt’s scheme.

You know those people that are so good and trusting and true that they make you feel bad about yourself, but you can’t hate them because they’re so totally beautiful and perfect and amazing?

That’s Aurora.

The last thing she said to me before she left was, “Fine! Why don’t you just go destroy the world, then?”

But that’s not what I want at all.