Mike Milo’s Journal

For everyone who has ever had an evaluation – just remember, it could have been worse. These are actual quotes taken from Federal Government employee performance evaluations.

1. “Since my last report, this employee has reached rock-bottom and has started to dig.”

2. “I would not allow this employee to breed.”

3. “This employee is really not so much of a has-been, but more of adefinite won’t be.”

4. “Works well when under constant supervision and cornered like a rat in a trap.”

5. “When she opens her mouth, it seems that it is only to change feet.”

6. “This young lady has delusions of adequacy.”

7. “He sets low personal standards and then consistently fails to achieve them.”

8. “This employee is depriving a village somewhere of an idiot.”

9. “This employee should go far, and the sooner he starts, the better.”

10. “Got a full 6-pack, but lacks the plastic thingy to hold it all together.”

11. “A gross ignoramus — 144 times worse than an ordinary ignoramus.”

12. “He doesn’t have ulcers, but he’s a carrier.”

15. “He’s been working with glue too much.”

16. “He would argue with a signpost.”

17. “He brings a lot of joy whenever he leaves the room.”

18. “When his IQ reaches 50, he should sell.”

19. “If you see two people talking and one looks bored, he’s the other one.”

20. “A photographic memory but with the lens cover glued on.”

21. “A prime candidate for natural de-selection.”

22. “Donated his brain to science before he was done using it.”

23. “Gates are down, the lights are flashing, but the train isn’t coming.”

24. “He’s got two brains cells, one is lost and the other is outlooking for it.”

25. “If he were any more stupid, he’d have to be watered twice a week.”

26. “If you give him a penny for his thoughts, you’d get change.”

27. “If you stand close enough to him, you can hear the ocean.”

28. “It’s hard to believe he beat out 1,000,000 other sperm.”

29. “One neuron short of a synapse

30. “Some drink from the fountain of knowledge; he only gargled.”

31. “Takes him 2 hours to watch ‘60-minutes’.”

32. “The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead”

My dad sent me this. I LOVE it!
With hurricanes, tornado’s, flooding and severe t-storms tearing up the country from one end to another, the quote of the month is:Jay Leno: “Are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?”

Here’s a quick render of the Nextel ad I recently did for 3DBob. You can see the actual commercial here. It has a dummy track tho’, but you’ll get the idea.

Instead tell your storm how big your GOD is!

This may be just a story but it’s a good one. I always wonder who writes these things? This one sounds like it came for reader’s Digest or something. tugged at my heart strings just the same!

In Phoenix, Arizona, a 26-year-old mother stared

down at her 6 year old son, who was dying of terminal leukemia. Although her heart was filled

with sadness, she also had a strong feeling of determination. Like any parent, she wanted her

son to grow up and fulfill all his dreams. Now that was no longer possible..

The leukemia would see to that. But she still wanted her son’s dreams to come true. She took her son’s hand and asked, “Billy, did you ever think about what you wanted to be once you grew up? Did you ever dream and wish what you would do with your life?”
Mommy, “I always wanted to be a fireman when I grew up.” Mom smiled back and said, “Let’s see if we can make your wish come true.”

Later that day she went to her local fire department in Phoenix, Arizona, where she met

Fireman Bob, who had a heart as big as Phoenix.

She explained her son’s final wish and asked if it might be possible to give her six-year-old son

a ride around the block on a fire engine.

Fireman Bob said, “Look, we can do better than that. If you’ll have your son ready at seven o’clock Wednesday morning, we’ll make him an honorary fireman for the whole day. He can come down to the fire station, eat with us, go out on all the fire calls, the whole nine yards! And if you’ll give us his sizes, we’ll get a real fire uniform for him, with a REAL fire hat. One-with the emblem of the Phoenix Fire Department on it, a yellow slicker like we wear and rubber boots. They’re all manufactured right here in Phoenix, so we can get them fast.”

Three days later Fireman Bob picked up Billy, dressed him in his fire uniform and escorted him

from his hospital bed to the waiting hook and ladder truck. Billy got to sit on the back of the

truck and help steer it back to the fire station.

He was in heaven. There were three fire calls in Phoenix that day and Billy got to go out on all

three calls. He rode in the different fire engines, the paramedic’s van, and even the fire chief’s car.

He was also videotaped for the local news program. Having his dream come true, with all the

love and attention that was lavished upon him, so deeply touched Billy that he lived three months longer than any doctor thought possible.

One night all of his vital signs began to drop dramatically and the head nurse, who believed in

the hospice concept that no one should die alone, began to call the family members to the hospital.

Then she remembered the day Billy had spent as a fireman, so she called the Fire Chief and asked if it would be possible to send a fireman in uniform to the hospital to be with Billy as he made his transition

The chief replied, “We can do better than that. We’ll be there in five minutes. Will you please do me a favor? When you hear the sirens screaming and see the lights flashing, will you announce over the PA system that there is not a fire? It’s just the fire department coming to see one of its finest members one more time. And will you open the window to his room?

About five minutes later a hook and ladder truck arrived at the hospital and extended its ladder
up to Billy’s third floor open window 16 firefighters climbed up the ladder into
Billy’s room. With his mother’s permission, they hugged him and held him and told him how much they loved him.

With his dying breath, Billy looked up at the fire chief and said,
“Chief, am I really a fireman now?”

“Billy, you are, and the Head Chief, Jesus, is holding your hand,”
the chief said.
With those words, Billy smiled and said, “I know, He’s been holding my hand all day, and the angels have been singing..”

Building slightly on my last post- Here are some Joe Dugan hands from my most recent film
Joe Dugan- Mailman. I just drew these directly and scanned them into Photoshop and imported to Flash. Then I ran Trace Bitmap on them and broke them up into individual pieces of art. Finally I encased them all in a Graphics clip so I could call to them in the timeline when needed! Fun stuff!

When I first started in Flash, one of the first films I made was a short called Angel Angles. It was a simple film about 3 angels and their happenings in Heaven where they worked for the Man. I just wanted to learn Flash and this seemed a perfect way to do it. You can see Angel Angles here.
It was a fun film for me and I really learned a lot about what NOT to do in a Flash film. Some of the layers in that film got up into the 100’s! Yeah, I’ve learned a bit since then.
Anyway, here are some of the Master sheets I did for the film. It illustrates a good way to separate a character for Flash.

Primarily, I did everything encased in what’s known as a “movie clip” but when I went to Warner Bros. to do The Jackalope Boyz, I learned that you can not export a Flash film to video when you do animation as a movie clip. It has to be a graphic clip. Hard to believe that a “movie clip” can’t be used to make a movie but that’s the case! Go figure!

Nowadays, I do not make Master sheets so much but really just draw the character parts and scan it in. I also do not color it before I break it up. It’s much easier to color in Flash that in Photoshop and you can vectorize artwork easier in Flash as well which makes for smaller file sizes! Sweet! Of course if you look at the plane in the first scene of Angel Angles you’ll clearly see I did not vectorize it first. Silly me!

Wow! Some guy spent what amounts to quite a hefty bit of time scanning in all these Disney model sheets! There’s something from just about every single Disney film including a fair amount from Pixar as well! Amazing! Go check it out!

This is from an idea I had about 4 college kids that lived in a dorm together and the how their personalities collide. Each was slacker in his own way and they were merciless when it came to making fun of each other. It was supposed to be called St. Bart’s.

Yet another idea I’ve never done a thing with. But then, it’s been done and done better so eh why bother?

Still, I might make this into a Flash cartoon down the road. I need someone to help me write it though.

Ahh well, all in good time.

As an aside, I’ve actually been thinking seriously about making a Flash tutorial DVD.

One that shows in depth exactly how to make a Flash film, from setup of the characters to animating them, and if I did that, I’d need a subject. Maybe this is it.

Lastly, I started working on a 4th Joe Dugan-Mailman today.
This one is set in a diner and Joe talks about how e-mail is killing his career. Flashkit.com just accepted it into their archives which is pretty cool because it will bring increased traffic to my site and at the end of it is a commercial for the newest Ribeye the Bullbarian book.

It’s all good!

Many years ago when my friend Harry and I were in college together, we realized that we would never be able to (at the time) make full blown cartoons due to the man-power it required back then with cel-painting and the endless drawings and in-betweens needed. We hit upon the idea of doing comics because that was an attainable goal to produce and Charlie Hippo was our star.

Most of the stories centered around Charlie going off on an adventure with his best friend Louie Hedgehog. It was very similar to Floyd Gottfriedson’s Mickey Mouse comics or Carl Barks’ Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge stories.
As we got more experienced we started to do other things and Charlie sort of went the wayside for many years. Most recently, we did a short Flash film to promote the launch of Zaptoons.com

Charlie Hippo is the first character I ever created and I wanted to see if he would translate to 3D. It came out passible. I’m sure that a T.D like Jason would cringe at the topology of the model but visually it works. That seems to be the next major hurdle I will have to overcome. How to CORRECTLY model a character with the correct topology. Sigh, alas my work is never done. ;-)

I believe Charlie Hippo will be the subject of my next film. If I can ever get him to be rigged correctly.
The story would focus on Charlie, who is an inadvertant adventurer.

I believe Zaptoons. com will be publishing our first 6 issues of Zaptoons tales, which featuered Charlie Hippo in it’s pages some time this year.

Of course isn’t that just like me to get ahead of myself and think up new ideas before the previous ones are even remotely finish but my mind is a restless one and I guess I really have no choice. Anyway, I only posted this so there would be something new to see. I hope you like it.

This is a strictly mathematical viewpoint…it goes like this:

What Makes 100%? What does it mean to give MORE than 100%? Ever wonder about those people who say they are giving more than 100%? We have all been to those meetings where someone wants you to give over 100%. How about achieving 103%? What makes up 100% in life?

Here’s a little mathematical formula that might help you answer these questions:

If:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

is represented as:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26.

Then:

H-A-R-D-W-O-R-K
8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%

and

K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E
11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96%

But,

A-T-T-I-T-U-D-E
1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%

And,

B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T
2+21+12+12+19+8+9+20 = 103%

AND, look how far ass kissing will take you.

A-S-S-K-I-S-S-I-N-G
1+19+19+11+9+19+19+9+14+7 = 118%

So, one can conclude with mathematical certainty that While Hard work and Knowledge will get you close, and Attitude will get you there, it’s the BullshiT and Ass kissing that will put you over the top.