Bunny Blog

If you’re a UI designer of any sort, you might be looking for a swift, elegant, and why not, even web-based solution for quickly mocking up components, web pages, whatever.  Enter the Mockingbird.

What, you mean you've never used MockingbirdTube?

Mockingbird is a fast, easy interface for building and sharing wireframes.  You can add links to your wireframes for live navigational previews, quickly share with others via PDF exports or email, and live collaboration tools are apparently coming soon.

Mockingbird is currently in beta, but that ends real soon.  Mockingbird operates on a subscription-based model – perhaps a little overpriced if you’re not doing this stuff constantly – but it’s still worth a look!

Yon trim Shakespeare on the tree, indeed.  Wow, that’s probably the most esoteric reference I (or possibly anyone) have ever made.

A while ago we shot an original pilot with our friends at Social Animal with their revolutionary 360-degree camera rig. Social Animal just got featured on The Web.Files, and mentioned our pilot, “Qualia.” Here’s that episode, which features never-before-seen footage of 360-degree Qualia! You are going to love it. It’s probably going to change your life. For the better. Like the invention of cutlery.

This makes the second time we’ve been featured on the Web.Files. Congrats to Sandra Payne, Perry Payne,  and Krystyn Burtt for creating such a great, quality show.

Sexual leads Jessica Alba and Channing Tatum are gunning for Oscar gold in this tender romance that finally confronts the issue of anti-snake person bigotry in our society.

Something tells me that you’d like to win a $100 Best Buy gift card from your friends at Psychic Bunny.

But, how!?

During the month of June, spread the word about the Psychic Bunny Newsletter! When your friends and associates sign up here, make sure they put your name in the referral field.  The person with the most referrals wins.

Why would my friends want to subscribe to the Psychic Bunny Newsletter?

Our newsletter is unconventional and fun.  AND one randomly drawn new June subscriber will WIN a $50 Best Buy gift card!  Aw, isn’t love grand?

Drawing by Andrew Chittenden

More details:

New subscribers must survive one email newsletter without unsubscribing.  You wouldn’t want to make Rick sad, would you?  You may sign up your friends, but not without their consent.  The minimum number of referrals required to be eligible to win is 10.  We will contact both winners and post their names on this very blog.  The contest ends at midnight Pacific Standard Time on June 30, 2010.

Hey wait, what if I’m not a subscriber…can I win both prizes?

Goodness, someone likes prizes.  Yes, you sure can!  The drawing for the $50 Best Buy gift card is random, so it is indeed possible.

Can I re-post this?

Yes please!

Do you like having imaginary conversations with yourself?

Ok, I think that I’ve answered quite enough questions for now.  If there are further questions you can email me at jazz [at] psychicbunny.com.

We have a lot of assets here at Psychic Bunny and when you have tons of different people working on the same project, both off the network and on individual hard drives, it can get a bit messy sometimes. Which is the latest file? Did we make sure to back up everything?

Check out this program from Deltopia called DeltaWalker - it has a really easy compare feature for syncing drives, and tells you immediately what’s an older version, which files you’re missing, and has really easy to understand bird’s eye views. Cost? $40.

This is from a totally different event last year, but since I don't know of any photos taken of me at the actual Kickstarter party let's just lie and say this is one of them.

Last Wednesday I was down at The Brewery here in L.A., kickin’ it with the Kickstarter founders and a lot of people from the community they’ve built.  It was a great evening full of positive vibes and success stories.

I met a producer for Werner Herzog (who as you might expect had a wide variety of interests), a musician (with a variety of bands and talents), a designer with a new technology for textile printing (who it turns out I’ve known for at least a year online), an author (who used Kickstarter to get accredited as a yoga instructor), some freaked-out fish (who didn’t like being transplanted from one tank to another), and at least one of the founders (who looks about as cool and unassuming as you might think)… all held in a wonderful and generously-hosted space in one of L.A.’s premier art communities.  In fact, if I hadn’t clearly been poisoned (why else would I have been sick for the last week?  no possible explanation), I would call the night an unqualified success.

Regardless, I was impressed by the casual, come-as-you-are gathering of minds that very accurately represented the Kickstarter ethos to my eyes.  That’s the power that Kickstarter offers – whatever it is you want to do with your life, if you can make a case for it, Kickstarter can help you get there.

Hope to see you guys back again soon – in the meantime… time to get some more projects off the ground!

Okay.

Blah, blah, blah, iTunes, digital music, DRM, RIAA, vinyl/warm/anaolog, joy of owning a record, convenience, can-tell-the-difference-between-MP3-and-CD- shut up.

So we love paradigm shifts here at Psychic Bunny and I fucking love rock and roll. I love music of all kinds, actually, but I wanted to swear in the blog post and rock makes that easy and feel cool. No matter what side of any of those bullshit debates or buzzwords you’re on, there’s no denying that music is an industry in a crisis of delivery. It is a HARBINGER, say I for the crisis games and movies will be going through soon soon SOON, so we should all pay attention, especially when indies are involved and trying desperately to break onto a scene that is now literally flooded with too many choices for consumers to ever find the good stuff.

So let me tell you about this awesome band KILLOLA.

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Thanks for re-confusing the issue, kiddos.

So it is May again which means that it is time for me to suggest that if you are curious about the hot new cool games and designers you’re going to hear about in the next few years, you would hedge your bets nicely to see what’s coming out of USC’s Interactive Media division this year at their graduate thesis show.

The event runs through Thursday and the gallery stays open mostly gallery hours and as in the past these are hands-on exhibitions, so you’ll get to actually try this stuff out. Of course, they’ve chosen to name their show the name we used to be using for Codename, making things a little confused again, but we forgive you guys and hope Activision leaves you alone. All the details can be found here.

To promote their bar and get in with the indie filmmaking community, Locals Sports Bar & Grill is offering an AMAZING deal:

- Free filming at their location (a great sports bar)

- Free lighting (a couple Kinos, among other lights)

- Free use of their camera (A Canon XL, not great but can’t complain about the price)

- Free security during shooting

- Free catered lunch and craft services. WHAT? Well, they’re a grill, so they’re going to cook for you for free.

- Free post screening and wrap party location for your movie as well.

What are the buts?They have a few requirements…

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Yeah. So this happened.

So some of you out there might have been following a (film critic I’m not going to call by name since that will drive up his google numbers and thus play into his hands)’s recent attempts to become relevant again by reaching out and picking a fight with games for no good reason.

I’m not going to link to his blog post as that would definitely play into his hands, but the short summary is that in 2005 this person decided to say something inflammatory about a different medium than he made his living critiquing and got himself a nice little storm of comments like you can count on the Internet to predictably provide. Then a few weeks ago, because, it seems, he’s at least managed to embrace one tenet of the 21st century (if you say something inflammatory on the internet, people will pay attention to you again!) he decided to revisit this unbelievable assertion and milk it like he was James Cameron hoping for some extra Avatar 3D money.

P.S. Mr. Cameron, we love you carnally.

Full disclosure: In revisiting this goldmine of “no such thing as bad free publicity,” the critic in question chose to go after a rebuttal talk delivered by one of my schoolmates, dearest friends and fellow game designers, Kellee Santiago. When this happened, I stayed out of the fray since I have an obvious conflict of interest. But then someone brought the above tweet to my attention, which appears to be another more shameless attempt to provoke outrage. On that I will comment.

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