Recently, I created an IM icon for a friend. It’s a fairly straight-forward appropriation of the classic Che Guevara icon, which normally I’d avoid but the Simon’s surname is pronounced ‘Che’, so my hands were tied.
an IM icon created for a friend (whose name is a homonym for che’s)
In the process I decided to adorn my IM profiles with the mighty ‘Pico’ icon, something that had slipped my mind for years.
My new IM icon (based on my Pico character)
The original artwork dates is from the flash-based pico game I made for a uni assignment at Hong Kong University in 2002. As I spent all my free (and a fair chunk of my uni) time exploring Hong Kong with my friends, the assignment was developed in a marathon 48 hour cram session in the HKU multimedia labs.
The game wasn’t always called Pico
The game itself is a pretty basic affair, but still makes me laugh when I see the artwork and animations. As a bonus, it’s fiendishly difficult (being alone in a CS lab at 4am does tend to warp a coder’s mind). Give it a go, it’s a great cure for apathy.
Hong Kong Island (including HKU) is an festival of stairs and elevators
The whole 2-day stint was surreal; the deadlines, the long walk along pok fu lam road, the long hours, the great music, the septuagenarian tai-chi club which trained (complete with weapons) right outside the labs at dawn (their existence was unknown to me previously and seems unreal still).
Pok Fu Lam road, connecting HKU campus to the halls