Yeah, so if you haven’t figured it out on your own by now, yesterday’s post was a complete fabrication. I made the whole thing up!

Bwahahahahaha!

As if all that text being underneath the date of April 1st wasn’t enough of a give away, I inserted a few other Easter eggs. “Monkey401” is not a real person. The “401” in his name means April 1st. The e-mail I said he supposedly sent me was in fact written by me, and is essentially the written equivalent of an over-the-top campy actor hamming it up. Though I did try very hard to make it seem like an authentic idiot e-mail, like I do get from time to time, I purposely overplayed the part to have some more fun with it. Heh heh. Besides, everyone should know by now that I’d never get depressed over something like that. Come on, “stop waching POKEMAN and just go away u sick freak bcuz no1 caeres about stupdi crap anime drawnigns!“, That’s just hilarious!

The major clue comes from this sentence:

“After opening this e-mail, I realize that life is too short to waste on things I enjoy like drawing and websites.”

You can see that a few letters seem arbitrarily bolded for no apparent reason. Well if you took those bold letters and stuck them together in the order which they appear, you’d get…

APRIL FOOLS

Besides that, it should be pretty obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention that I’d never seriously say a sentence like that.

“It’s been real.” Yeah, right. I don’t talk like that either. Unless I’m being sarcastic.

Ahh yes, and then there was “Adios!” replacing my trademark “Sayonara“. By that point something should have seemed off and everyone should have known that I was just being silly.

So there you have it. The whole thing was just some dark humor on April Fools day, mostly at my own expense. To those who were not fooled, good for you! And to those who where upset about me not drawing anymore and shutting this place down, don’t worry. I’m not going away. I’m not taking my site down. I’m not going to stop drawing. I’m not going to stop watching POKEMAN. I’m never growing up. I’ll still be right here on SykoGrafix, drawing, colouring, writing my stuff, kicking ass, and making fun of stupid people from here until the end of time. Count on it.

Oh, and to anyone who was actually happy when I said that I was just going away, never to be seen again, this is all I have to say to you:

SUCKERS! MUHUHUHAHAHAHAHA!

Sayonara.

You know, over the years, I’ve taken my fair share of criticism. Some of it deserved, perhaps, but much of it being nothing more than poorly constructed filth from people I have absolutely no interest in pleasing anyway. And the way I tend to deal with such criticism is no secret. I make fun of them, and have a damn good time doing it. But, doing so has also subjected me to even more criticism from people who are offended by that. So the disgusting comments just keep on coming, like pressurized sludge from a broken sewer pipe, and I am forced to choke on it all.

Well that’s enough. I’m not bulletproof. I’m just a man. I have feelings too, and there is only so much of this that I can take. For awhile, I thought that I could handle it, but now I know that I can’t. I just got this e-mail from someone called “Monkey401“.

OMG ur art is so sux! i hate this websiet!!!1 its teh worse sote ive evre seen! u shoud leran to draw u bastard how come y hav eto draw so crappy dawg. stop drawign stupid ANIME amd draw forr eal!! but i bet u cant eevn do that becasue u jsut suck so bad . jsut quit rite now shut thsi webiste down forever stop waching POKEMAN and just go away u sick freak bcuz no1 caeres about stupdi crap anime drawnigns! WTF this site is so gay! i will get all my freinds together and shut thsi site down if u dont! IDIOT NINJA U SUCK!!!!!!!!!!

Well, that’s it then. I can’t deal with this anymore. You win. All of you guys who have been saying bad things about me, you all win. I’m going to take my site down sometime before the end of this week. I’ve never wanted to offend anyone, so if someone hates my site so much that they feel compelled to write that, then I guess it’s better if I just go away, never to be seen again. After opening this e-mail, I realize that life is too short to waste on things I enjoy like drawing and websites. Maybe it’s finally time for me to just grow up.

So, it’s over. I’m calling it quits. Anyone who wants to try to contact me for whatever reason had better do so soon before I torch this dump forever. You can try to talk me out of it if you want, but I doubt it’ll work.

It’s been real.

Adios!

Last night I finally decided to undertake a little project that has been years in the making.

It is well known information that I enjoy collecting Transformers. Well, much like every chicken much hatch from an egg and leave the shell behind, every Transformer is removed from its package, leaving the box behind. So, throughout my several years of acquiring Transformers toys, I have also acquired a lot of Transformers boxes along with them.

Well, I always keep the boxes. I just don’t want to throw them away. So, these boxes have been in storage, taking up space, for a long, long time. With recent purchases of several large toys, I knew that I wouldn’t have much room for the boxes anymore. And so, it was time to flatten them.

So, here are some pictures of the boxes before I started. You can see that the floor was almost completely covered with them. I’ve got boxes here from Generation 2, Beast Wars, Machine Wars, Beast Machines, Robots in Disguise, Armada, and Energon.

It was tough to say goodbye. I really like the packaging. It’s a part of the product as a whole, and I’m sure that a lot of hard work goes into designing them. They have some great artwork and photographs. But when I was finished, that huge pile was reduced to this:

The smaller boxes were flattened, folded, and placed inside the boxes from my recently acquired Omega Supreme and Omega Sentinel. The boxes that were too big to fit in either of those went into this large plastic container. Ironically, Unicron’s box was left unfed.

I had to draw the line somewhere though. I just couldn’t bear to flatten my Japanese or Korean boxes. I just think they look neat.

So, now that that’s all done, the result is that it hardly made any difference. The boxes from the Omegas that I just got take up about as much room as all the smaller boxes I’ve had for years. Bah!

Sayonara.

Earlier this week I finally finished watching the fansubbed episodes of Transformers Super Link, the Japanese version of the show we know as Energon. I’ve had these episodes for awhile, but I hadn’t felt up to investing the time to finish watching the series. But with TransformersCon coming up and me running the fan panel on the night before I wanted to see the whole thing and have it fresh in my mind, so I started watching from the beginning.

As I watched the series, and especially as I neared the end, I just could not believe that so many people have said that they don’t like it. It boggles my mind that anyone, especially Transformers fans, could hate this show. This show rocked on so many levels! Now that I’ve seen the entire series from start to finish, I can honestly say that this is far and away the best Transformers show ever. Yeah, you read that right. Best ever. Better than Beast Wars, and much, much better than Generation 1.

Super Link has everything I’d ever want in a Transformers show. Great characters, amazing battles, internal conflict, metaphor, symbolism, everything. Even the main human character, Kicker, was not annoying! The way that characters like Ironhide (Roadbuster) and Scorponok (Mega Zarak) grew and changed through the series due to various circumstances was masterfully done, and even characters with smaller roles, like Landmine, had a little quip here or there that cemented who they were and what they were all about. It was a huge epic with different messages about knowing ones place as a part of team, obeying orders for the right reasons, and doing everything one can to accomplish a goal even if it seems insignificant. Not morals per say, but different, and often contradictory, interpretations of messages like these that aren’t going to try and change anyone’s life around, but are there nonetheless. The ending was mind blowing and very emotionally draining. Far from simple kids’ stuff.

It’s too bad that people have been turned off by the English dub, but I can’t accept that. If you don’t like the dub, seek alternatives! Fansubs have been available from TV-Nihon. If you just can’t stand anime, grow up! Anime is here to stay and Transformers has always had more of a connection with anime than it does to North American animation, so get used to it already. If you hated Armada, suck it up and watch this show anyway. There’s no excuse. But hey, those people who call themselves Transformers fans but refuse to watch this show, it’s their loss! Most people like that just want G1 all over again. Well Super Link is not G1, and thank Primus for that!

I really hope that there are other folks coming to TransformersCon who loved Super Link as much as I did, because I really can’t wait to discuss the show at the fan panel on the Friday before. This weekend, YTV will be airing the final 4 episodes of Energon, as well as the classic Transformers The Movie, so we should all be caught up with show after that.

As for me, I’m moving on to the new show, Galaxy Force! As Alpha Q would say “Something cool might happen again!“

Sayonara.

This weekend was the final lesson of my Anime Round 2 class. Overall I’m pretty happy with how it went. The students, for the most part, took the material seriously, which made my job a lot easier because I’ve dealt with a few classes in the past with students who were more interested in goofing around than actually drawing anything. The course, on the whole, isn’t as much fun as Round 1 or 3, but the material is more important in the long run, so it was great to have a group that saw it the same way. Granted, some of them still have a long way to go, but I think everyone’s much better off than they were when they first started. There was a lot of improvement there.

There were these two kids, however, that are an interesting case. Two brothers, one of whom is very young, the other not much older. They jumped in during the middle of the fall session, so right off the bat they missed out on several important lessons that they’ve never been caught up with. Then they suddenly appeared at the start of this winter’s session without anyone knowing that they’d be there. I don’t think they ever arrived on time for class even once, so that was frustrating to deal with. Their mother would often ask me if they were behaving, worried that they’d start fighting like they do at home, but things never got out of hand. Most of the time they just worked on their own drawings and didn’t really care about anything I had to tell anyone, but since they weren’t bouncing off the walls or anything, I didn’t complain as not to upset the balance of the classroom. But their drawings were surprisingly very clean for their ages. I have no idea if they are going to be coming back for the next session, so when the younger of the two started talking about how he and his brother fight each other, I decided I’d have a little fun and encouraged the younger lad to fight back as hard as he could. Ahh, good times. They both seen to have a genuine interest in drawing, so I wonder what will happen with them.

So now I am off for the next month or so until I start teaching again in the Spring. Hopefully I’ll be teaching two classes at that point, Anime Round 3 with returning students and Anime Round 1 with new students. Until then I’ve got some other work to do, and while I’m sure to enjoy the break, I’m sure that I’ll be itching to get back at it again in no time.

Sayonara.