Stray Hawkeye

I was out at the bar over the weekend with some of my geekier friends.  In conversation it came up that one of them has a motorcycle, which he has named “Frogger”.  (See, I told you they were on the geekier side.)  One of my other friends recently got an air brush kit, and is planning to help paint said motorcycle with, as they put it, “bad ass frogs”.  So, being geeks, we not only had our laptops with us, but were at a bar with wifi – so we busted out the internet and went to work finding bad ass frogs to use as models for said motorcycle air brush mural.  Some of the highlights were:

• Kinda scary looking frog with teeth
• Ninja frog on a rope
• Real life hypno-toad
• Ready frog
• A variety of mini-fig frogs with weapons
• Mr Burns frog (about half way down the page in the comments)
• And finally, a little too fittingly, a frog on a motorcycle

But eventually, we came to thinking, why not use the actual Frogger frog?  So, we found an image of the original cover, and realized how lame and entirely not bad ass the original Frogger frog was:

A tie? A watch? A vest? A freaking brief case?!? Maybe there was a reason all those cars had it in for him.

Pretty wimpy, but we have computers, and GIMP – we can fix this.

So, over the next hour or two, I drunkenly photoshoped (okay, so I don’t actually have the program, but “GIMP’ed” just sounds wrong) up our video game hero to toughen him up a bit, while carrying on a few other conversations.  There were plenty of inputs from my other drunken, laptop toting, geek companions (“give him some tattoos”, ” put some blood on his mouth”, “make his butt less pointy”, “he should have a sword, no, an anime sword”, “give him angry eyelids, no, not like that, angle them, no, this way”) to help with the process.  Until we eventually came up with:

Not bad for a few beers in (though looking at it sober, it does have some rough edges here and there).

And then, of course, we realized he must vanquish the lesser version of himself, who has apparently been sweating in fear for decades now (click for bigger):

There can be only one.

It’s my desktop background image now.

This article / list from Field & Stream is interesting in a whole lot of ways, especially the bluntness and practicality of it.  It’s a list of rules for gunfighting.  My favorites:

23. Your number one option for personal security is a lifelong commitment to avoidance, deterrence, and de-escalation.

That one, though probably the most useful and applicable in most cases, admittedly gets a bit lost among the other ones that are more towards the practical side once that has failed, like this one:

27. Regardless of whether justified of not, you will feel sad about killing another human being. It is better to be sad than to be room temperature.

A lot more truth than you find in the standard TV cop drama five minutes left until the top of the hour gun fight to wrap things up quickly scene.

Some of the prettiest non-functional weaponry I’ve seen out there.

Via Web Urbanist