little lost robot

Welcome to the personal website of JL Watkins (aka LL Robot). I’m a TV news photographer/web reporter in Greenville, SC. My lovely wife and I have been here for just over two years, but my heart and home will always be in my favorite city, Portland, Oregon. I work at WYFF4, the local NBC affiliate, and previously worked at Fox 12 in PDX. I’ve covered a ton of awesome events, and in 2006 I was part of the Hearst-Argyle team to cover the Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy. I was recently honored with three regional Emmy Awards for best Photographer, Specialty Reporter and Performer.

I’m a freak for the following things: robots, comic books, electronic music, TV, and online video games. Pretty much your standard geek.

Little Lost Robot, the blog of my ongoing adventures has been active for the past five years, and has been published in blog-form since 2003. [Tech specs can be found here.]

My website name comes from several sources of inspiration (and has nothing to do with being drunk and single when I registered the domain name):

1. The fantastic short story, “Little Lost Robot” by Isaac Asimov.
2. It could easily have been “Lost Little Robot” had I went with the Beborn Beton song of the time.
3. But, in all honesty I comes from my favorite photo of all time: my 1980 robot Halloween costume [pictured below]

current projects

Writing: Right now, I’m hard at work writing his first novel (title to be revealed later), a comedy/romance set in the world of online roleplaying games. And I’m also still dabbling in writing graphic novels [see ‘past projects’ below].

Vodcast: Also, for the past year, I’ve kept busy as the producer/host of my own weekly vodcast, Click on JL.

Photography: I don’t take nearly enough hobby-oriented photos as I would like to, but I have a growing collection of photos in my photo set, “A Robot’s Life” that I someday plan on showing in a gallery.

past projects

Comic Books: I’m a huge comic book fan, and just over a year ago I decided to try my hand at producing my own comic book. Anamorphic follows the comedic exploits of a crew of futuristic indie filmmakers. It was gorgeously drawn by the talented Julia Bax (X-Men: First Class) and colored by Sabrina Eras.

Here’s my Anamorphic blog showing off the progression of the project, up until I kinda walked away to get some perspective after getting my Image comics rejection letter. I plan on getting back on the project as soon as I get a new game plan together. [update: I’m back in the Anamorphic game - more on that later!]

Here’s a illustration that Julia did of me in a post-apocalyptic word:

Short Films: I love making videos and movies. I learned after making a painful afterschool-special of a feature film, that I’m better suited at making short films. Last year my website traffic exploded when I made “My Robot Humps”, a robotic parody of the BEP song, “My Humps”.

You can find most of my other films in my directory or my Little Lost Robot’s
YouTube page.

Film Festivals: In addition to making short films, I’ve been involved in serveral Portland, OR area film festivals. In addition to that I co-produced two insane indie horror film festivals: Gore-O-Rama-A-Go-Go (April 2002), and Season’s Bleedings [photo gallery]

hobbies and interests

Video Games: I’m an avid video gamer, particularly massive online rolplaying games - of which I’ve nearly dabbled in them all. My all time favorite is Everquest, where I played a half-elf bard Loveknife, who now is forever immortalized on his own static domain page. I’m currently subscribed to World of Warcraft and was recently beta testing Tabula Rasa. I plan on playing Warhammer Online (and Age of Conan when it’s released on the Xbox 360).

Right now, I’m playing the heck out of my Xbox 360, my gamergard is somewhere on the right sidebar.