Tired of the same old routine? Looking for something to lighten your spirits? Then point your browser to: www.killfrog.com/, make sure your speakers are on and have plenty of tissues on hand because chances are, you'll laugh so hard you'll cry. Be forewarned, when you enter the site, a quick warning pops up in bold letters: "PARENTS STRONGLY CAUTIONED, Some material may be inappropriate for everybody."

But really, if you want to see a great example of animation on the web, this is a great site. Created by 32 year old Kevin Swearingen, based in Denver, Colorado, Killfrog.com came to my attention when I was reading the technology section of a local newspaper. There, the link pointed to www.amused.com/. At the time, part of the story was about an animation of "How to make a Chocolate Easter Bunny."

When I got home, I went to the site and loaded the animation. Watching this animation for the first time, I laughed so hard I was in tears. Finally, here was a site that made use of technology for the purpose of creating great cartoons and animations. At that time, some of the predominant animations were "Spin the Kitty," "Fluff the Kitty," and some animated shorts. Of these, two classics stand out, "Kat vs. Monday Morning," and "Kat vs. Safe."

Kevin, the site creator and animator has a twisted sense of humor, and depending on whether you're under or over 21, he credits his inspiration to a suspicion of being dropped on the head when little or to hard work, raw talent and case after case of "Fat tire beer." When one considers the great masters of cartooning, he draws inspiration from Berkely Breathed (creator of "Bloom County"), Spumco, Robin Williams, and Charles Schultz (creator of "Peanuts").

The Killfrog name was the byproduct of a volleyball clothing line he created, called "Dead Frog" inactive wear. While the clothing line did well for 4 years, he felt the need to move on. The Killfrog site came into being at the urging of a Joe, a friend of his and the creator of the infamous site joecartoon.com. As for the name Killfrog? It came from a screen name he likes to use. Go figure.

On the technical side, Kevin uses Adobe Illustrator for all of his cartoons and has been using this program for about 12 years. Surprisingly, he uses the mouse to draw and neither scans his art into the computer, nor does he use a stylus. This he says, is a preference of his. For animation, he says that: "Flash is possibly the greatest program ever created. I've been using it for about 2 years now, and I'm still learning new things about it. If you want to do web animation, this is the only program you need to learn." For the great sound effects on this site, he uses Deck 2, Felt Tip Studio, Acid, and SoundEdit16. Of these various programs, his preference is for Deck 2.

If you want to download some of the cartoons or sounds, visit the downloads page at: www.killfrog.com. You can choose to download an executable file that will run on your PC or Macintosh, which you can download to your computer, or you can open the file from the Killfrog site.