For those of you who downloaded the Here Comes A New Challenger album put out by Game Music 4 All last year, here’s a little sneak peak of the album art I’m working on. For those who haven’t I recommend following the link above to download it for free and listen to it!

I don’t want to show too much, but as you can see, I’m not holding anything back on this one. I took a different approach from the hoard of custom sprites I did for the first nerdy compilation, but I’m really liking how it’s turning out. Check the links below to download sweet wallpaper for your desktop!

Here Comes a New Challenger 2 Turbo Wallpaper (800 x 600)

Here Comes a New Challenger 2 Turbo Wallpaper (1024 x 768)

Here Comes a New Challenger 2 Turbo Wallpaper (1280 x 800)

Here Comes a New Challenger 2 Turbo Wallpaper (1440 x 900)

My current 3-D project is a scene from F-Zero for the Super Nintendo. So far I’ve finished three of the racers, and after I finish the fourth I will be building a track and the background from Mute City as well. Should be fun, since between all the pieces there are about 40,000 beads.

So far I’ve made the Blue Falcon, Golden Fox and Fire Stingray. After some complications with the unreliable mid-pink beads in the Stingray, however, I will likely be re-doing that one, perhaps in red, since I always found it odd that there was no red vehicle in the original SNES version of F-Zero.

The next vehicle will be the Wild Mongoose, also known as the green one, which should be easy after already figuring out how to build these three.

During this past week I was unwillingly dragged into an all out flame-fest on a social media site, which I will refrain from mentioning the name of in order to protect the privacy of those involved. Needless to say, it got very heated, and finally mellowed out before this past weekend. I’ll try to give as short of an account of the situation as I can.

It started when a member of my forum posted a link to a member’s page on this social media site. On this page was a picture of her current project, a giant bead sprite of Link from the Legend of Zelda series of games, by Nintendo. It turned out, she found the picture I posted of my Link character, and copied it. Now, I know what you’re thinking - Link is Nintendo’s creation, so what’s the big deal? It’s not a big deal, per se, but I spent 12 hours (ballpark figure) hand-pixeling the image, beading it, then ironing it - and the pixeling portion of that took up the better half of the total time it took for me to finish that project.

Artists on the Internet are not always bound by any strict laws, but in the spirit of common courtesy and the Creative Commons rights, any work from which an artist derives his or her own artwork should be credited appropriately. I credited Nintendo for the image I used as a reference for my hand-pixeled sprite (from which I created a bead sprite), so it makes sense that this girl should credit me as the one who pixeled and beaded the artwork from which she copied hers, right? On top of that, she found a photograph of the art that I took and uploaded to the same site. So technically, she should credit me for the photography, the upload, the pixeling and the sprite. All other rights, as I rightly credited my sources, belong to Nintendo.

So I visited her photo of the artwork she derived from mine (without attribution) to find a few people from the forum had already left comments asking her to give me credit. That was very nice of them, and their comments were civil. So I added my own, as the artist himself, asking nicely for credit.

However, the responses we received were rather harsh, and basically calling them idiots and me a credit stealing jerk. This girl’s husband was the first to jump in, telling me that I was trying to take credit for the actual character of Link, as well as all related material that could be found online (not sure where he got that from, seeing as I gave credit to my source in the description of the image ). Additionally, he thought it necessary to declare that he had “seen people do things with bead sprites that [I could] only dream of”. Cute.

As this string of comments continued, I kept my composure and presented a very logical (and mature)argument, mainly defending myself against the couple’s false accusations and slander against my otherwise good name. I ignored their childish name-calling for the duration of the discussion, but near the end, they just spouted the same insults (credit stealing jerk, asshurt, Octopussy, etc.) and accusations, completely ignoring what I had previously said.

By the end of it, I decided it better to just walk away, since it seemed like these people didn’t understand ordinary concepts of attribution and artistic rights on the Internet. I got dragged back in briefly, to try once more to illustrate the situation, but they still didn’t understand.

So the aforementioned couple are not people I love, so you must be wondering who is? The answer is the guy below, who will remain nameless, and whom I never even knew before I he posted his comment:

Using some one else’s artwork as a model for your own without including an attribution to the original artist (and then doing your best to paint him/her as an egotistical dick when he/she shows up and politely asks for an attribution) is always a classy move.

As a small-time fuse-beading/pixel artist who is not affiliated with anybody else who’s posted here (but who has watched this conversation unfold from its beginning), I find the comments you’ve posted throughout the above discussion (and those of your husband, DeadTree Photography) to be a fairly ugly comment on both of your characters.

You seem to have been intent from the very start on taking what should have been a reasonable, civil discourse (and what was obviously intended to be one) into all-out flame-war territory. Ordinary behavior, perhaps, if you’re a heinous bitch or a total head-case (something I’m sure many more people than just myself are beginning to suspect you are), but not for the mature, adult human being you’d like to project yourself as. I’d recommend doing a thorough head-check on yourself (and on the way in which you react to simple attempts at productive communication by fellow artists) before responding with downright nasty ad hominem attacks of the kind that pervade your responses in the above discussion, or - I’m sorry to say - you’re going to be in for a LIFE full of heinous bitch-slaps and unsympathetic smackdowns.

In short, dear, please do make an effort to get your head together. A good first step might be taking some time off from participation in online forums/user-generated content websites (like this one) until you have developed the maturity and class to fess up to your error and to apologize for the COLOSSAL effrontery you have displayed toward a real Perler bead artist who A) took the time to create something that was (at least partly) original, and B) had the decency to properly credit his source.

“Octopussy”? *rolls eyes*

Grow up or GTFO, hunny. The real world doesn’t tolerate your brand of self-indulgent bullshit.

So yeah, I love people like this, who just jump in and make a smashing point.

While not as grand a scale as the 3-D X-Wing Bead Sprite I made awhile back, I think this one is my favorite so far. It might be because it’s new and fresh, or because it’s based on one of the greatest side-scrolling space-shooters of all time, but I like how it looks more like a sprite (only in 3-D) than just a simple recreation of the craft in beads. Withoout further adieu, I present the Vic Viper from Gradius.

As some of you might already know, I’m working on an album set to release in May of this year. This will be a collection of 30+ chiptunes, each one a theme song for a hypothetical Nintendo game based on TV shows and cartoons from the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. Basically, the idea is, if they had made a NES game based on these shows, these would be the tracks from those games. I haven’t thought up a clever name for the album yet, hence I am referring to it as the “May 2009 Album”.

So I thought it would be cool to share a few tracks to give everyone an idea of what to expect. I made a super-fancy Flash MP3 player that I spent all day yesterday making just to share music with you fine folks. I’ve given the tracks mysterious names, but you guys are smart, I’m sure you’ll figure out which themes are which.

I’m very happy about the exposure I got on G4TV, even if it was just under a minute long. I was glad to be thrown into the “Nerdy Art and Music Blog” category, along with Nercore Rising and Get Lo-Fi. Following clips of MC Frontalot was something of an honor, even though I’m not huge on listening to Nerdcore music - I still like the idea behind it, and it’s always fun to watch some nerdy white boys rap.

Below is the video from the Blog Watch section of Attack of the Show, with my segment at about 1:10 into the clip. Aside from the fact that they think my site is called Doctor Octoroc and I call myself “8-Bit Jesus”, they did good. It’s not in the clip, but after the Blog Watch section the hosts made some comment about how making cars out of plastic beads would get our country out of economic crisis.

Be sure to check out all the other great sites that have been featured on Blog Watch!

Okay, so it’s not actually me on the show, but they are featuring my blog during Attack of the Show. The program airs tonight (April 9, 2009) at 7pm EST (4pm PST) and my segment will be about halfway through the hour long show (so about 4:30/7:30). There will also be 2-3 other neat blogs like mine in the segment, so if you like my content, you’re bound to like theirs as well!

If you miss the show, you can catch the segment on the G4TV website tomorrow.

If you love me watch it!

Time for another small scale 3-D bead sprite model in the series of a classic TV and movie cars, the Mach 5 from Speed Racer. Check out the tutorial for the Speed Racer Mach 5 bead sprite here.

Time for another small scale 3-D bead sprite model in the series of a classic TV and movie cars, the Party Van from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. Of course, it’s based more on the toy that came out in the 80’s. Check out the tutorial for the TMNT Party Van bead sprite here.