Baby Bro in LaLa Land

We spent most of today driving around Hollywood and Studio City with my baby brother, Dave. The bestest part was visiting his office. Big woop, right? But my brother works as the assistant art director for game development at Neopets. Which is owned by Nickelodeon and MTV. He gets to draw amazing creatures and color them and play games all day. In a very cool office. One hallway had paintings he had done of some of the characters all hanging in fancy frames. The enormous room full of cubicles where the artists work had a giant mural running all the way around the room. Dave had combined all the different Neopets characters into storylines and printed the art onto vinyl. Some of these characters were so cute I had to zoom in and snap their pics! I couldn't take any pictures of his current projects, but his computer is a tech geek's drool fest. He has an enormous Wacom tablet that is basically a giant touch screen, and then a second screen just to see the artwork. All the cubicles are filled with toys! The break room has every kind of gaming device and giant TVs and comfy chairs...  The downside to this heaven- yes, there is a downside- he can spend ages working on a very cool project just to see it canned for some minor detail. It just disappears into a file drawer.

He drove us around pointing out all his favorite haunts and laughing at the tourists. My heart skipped a beat when I saw a giant Kermit the Frog on top of a pretty brick building. When I gasped, he casually said, "oh that's the Muppet's Creature Workshop". Ahhhh... Someday, I want to go in THERE!