Actually, development stalled years ago on both the plugins, as my 3D graphics career has blossomed, I settled into married life, and now my wife and I have a baby due in May 2011. The thing is, people haven’t necessarily realized that and continue to regularly seek support on this site in the comments or via email, and my heart goes out to them. I wish them to seek out actively developed plugins, and toss my old, broken defunct plugins onto the scrapheap of history.

I sadly don’t have the spare time to work on either plugin. I wrote the plugins for me, years ago, and decided to share them with others, back when the functionality I sought didn’t already exist. Now, however, there are countless plugins that do similar, if not identical, things to my plugins.

All of my code is free and open source, as is the code my plugins depend upon (like Flickr code and the Lightbox javascripts). If anyone wishes to, please feel free to take over the reigns of either plugin. Barring that, and thus barring either plugin being brought up to date and made to work again, everybody please use alternative plugins that actually get updated more than every three years ;)

Lightbox users, I recommend looking into jQuery Lightbox Plugin. The reason is, besides the fact it is actively updated, 99.999% of issues people have had with my plugin is due to javascript conflicts. You will have fewer WordPress/javascript conflicts if you switch to a plugin that uses jQuery javascript libraries. Mixing Prototype and jQuery leads to heartache and busted website for less technical people.

Regardless of which plugins you opt for, just be aware that my wordpress plugins are old, broken, and utterly unsupported, and no longer in development.

Spread the word, and good luck to you and your blog! It’s been a blast.

Jean Giraud, aka Moebius, is the single greatest influence on my art. Born in Paris in 1938, he is in my opinion, by far the greatest illustrator to have lived. Moebius doesn’t have a particular style; rather, he has thousands of styles, often unique to the project he is working on. One of the founders and lead contributors to the seminal 1970′s comic magazine, Metal Hurlant (better known on this side of the Atlantic as Heavy Metal Magazine), his career has been as prolific as it has far reaching and influential.

You may know him indirectly from his contributions as storyboard artist for movies such as Alien, Abyss, 5th Element, Tron or countless others. His short comic with Dan O’Bannon, The Long Tomorrow, influenced the phenomenal movie Blade Runner as well as the writings of William Gibson, my favorite science fiction author.

I’ve learned so much from seeing and absorbing Moebius’ works. I’ve focused on drawing speed and line quality. I’ve learned to embrace the surreal and non-clich� in my own work, I’ve learned to adopt countless styles of drawing and creating, I’ve learned to play with narrative flow and just make stuff up as I go along. But my own work pales in comparison to the master.

I’ve long since stopped reading comics, and long since stopped drawing, yet the Moebius influence pervades my work even to this day. He was my last, and single greatest, influence in drawing.

There is precious little of his work on the web, and I don’t have a scanner, so alas I can’t provide many good examples of what he is capable of. Suffice to say I have at least 12 of his graphic novels, my favorite being his and Stan Lee’s epic Silver Surfer: Parable.

A thing of beauty, Silver Surfer is graceful, angelic and renaissance-inspired. Galactus is a massive false god who attempts to destroy human civilization. Page after page of jaw-dropping futuristic cityscapes, glass citadels and epic battles for earth’s fate.

Jean Giraud is a fountain of creativity. He is unto drawing, what Michelangelo is unto marble sculpture: pure genius. Horror, eroticism, fantasy, sci-fi, gorgeous desert landscapes, surrealism… he does it all, and better than I’ve seen it done before or since.

A documentary about Moebius is posted online at drawn.ca.

To see how strong an influence he was on my teenage mind, check out the old drawings at the bottom of my portfolio page.

A lengthy interview with her has surfaced on the web. She’s a very eloquent, brainy spokeswoman! She is certainly role model material, and I’m glad the Firefox people do what they do.

Check it out.

I also love my wage, which is generous and is just the starting wage. I’ve had my eye for years on a pair of audiophile-grade, floorstanding, unique and incredible speakers called Ohm Micro-Walsh Talls, which sell for over a grand US plus shipping. Not only can I now afford them, I can afford a new pair every paycheck. I’ve got my Visa bill licked after the first payday. I’m not sweating my student loans.

Work hard and play hard. And sleep hard. That’s always been my lifestyle and I get to live it every day. Nothings as great as getting up at 7 am and being stoked about the day ahead.

Happiness is feeling appreciated, and I do.

My favorite pieces were the life-size whale skeletons made out of sawn white plastic lawn chairs bolted together. Beautiful, massive, mysterious, eye-candy with an implicit, but not too trite, message about what we leave behind when we’re gone. Sad, silent, ivory white behemoths suspended from the ceiling; a reminder of the past.

The other highlight of the show was his West Coast aboriginal masks made from Nike ‘Air Jordan’ shoes stitched together in creative ways. Which sounds daft but actually works; the back, white and red are the traditional colour palette of native art here. These are beautiful, weird, grotesque, majestic… I could go on. Instead, check the photos I took before (and after) a security guard informed me that taking pictures is not allowed.
I will be the first to admit that I’m not a fan of West Coast native art. Living in Vancouver, it’s everywhere; from the tacky sculptures and paintings at airports, hotels and parks to the boxes that smoked salmon comes in, to tasteless T shirts in tourist districts. I cringe when I see Emily Carr paintings (and thusly avoid the top floor of the VAG). I also find art that plays the white-guilting racial card irritatingly clich?. So it was great to see a show that was not “native art” but rather contemporary art that is strong, thought provoking and about as unclich? as any I’ve seen.

You owe it to yourself to check it out.