Friday, October 28, 2005

On the issue of USA Today altering a photo of Condi Rice:
I used to do digital image correction for a living (well, at least for Taco Bell money) during undergrad. It's standard practice to sharpen the eyes of any subject, as it makes the photo more attention-grabbing. People notice eyes more than anything else in the photo. I don't believe that this was done on purpose. I don't really even care to make any other comment than to put up a picture of Cthulhu with the demon eyes- the first thing I thought of, naturally.

Seriously, whoever worked on that photo can be replaced with five minutes of searching monster.com for recent college grads with Photoshop skills- a number that rivals the population of China. The job market is grossly oversaturated, and mistakes like this can ruin you.

Thursday, October 27, 2005

I was under the impression that the universe and I had an understanding: don't bug me when I'm eating alone unless you know me. Seems logical, right? Today, this social contract was broken by a bespectacled tablewipe with a penchant for gab. I was sitting at a table, just reading a newspaper and eating my waffle fries, when the cleaning guy came to wipe down the table next to me. He asked me if the newspapers on this table were mine, and I said no. He took them and I went back to reading and eating. Then he came back to clean the table, and told me that somebody else would get the one I was sitting at. Most people would see this as the end of social pleasantries, but not this guy. He wanted to interrupt my daily reading of the op-ed page with his feelings about the chemical makeup of the table cleaning fluid. He told me that the bottle said it would irritate the skin and eyes, but that he had gotten it in his eyes a few times and it didn't hurt. I nodded politely, recalling the scene in the Mos Eisley cantina where Greedo confronts Han, and realizing that I was outgunned by a spray bottle filled with what he hypothesized was salt water. I was cornered, prone, and I still had half a sandwich to go before I could leave. He kept insisting that the chemical wasn't harmful, but I didn't want to find out. He left eventually, after talking my ear off.

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Back to the academic grind for me today. Not academic in the traditonal sense, perhaps, as I'm rendering a movement test right now. The arms get a little weird when they're raised above shoulder level.

I bought a new amp yesterday- a decently badarse 500 watt that's a behemouth compared to my little practice amp. I had resisted getting a larger amp before now because I didn't need anything huge, but the new one sounds good even at low volume. I underestimated my little Mexican strat- it sounds pretty good through this amp. When I tried the amp out at the store, I used a cheap beginner model because I figured the sound would compare. It turns out that my guitar sounds much better. I haven't tried my distortion pedal yet, as the natural gain is already pretty good. I'll be practicing with a drummer soon, so I wanted to get an amp that could be heard over that. If we happen to record any of the cacophony, I'll post the highlights.

Monday, October 24, 2005

Thanks to what I suspect were updates to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in blogger, my old blog template didn't really work anymore. You may have noticed the gaps in the top of the page large enough to insert a proper analogy about the size of the gap, and then some. I'm still trying to decide if I like the monochrome green.

Sunday, October 23, 2005

Trading one campus for another, I'm currently sitting in the Middle Ground coffee shop in the middle of Kenyon. I'm here for the family weekend, when the students somehow drop what they're doing to indulge a mob of blood-related tourists. Michael has been gracious enough to show us all the places he would be going to anyway, like his room (messy as mine), the newspaper office, and other points of interest. The paper office is in a tower in the old part of campus, making it cooler than any other office I've seen, even counting my own with the purple wall.

We got into town yesterday in time to see a wind ensemble concert that Michael was in. It was an enjoyable show- I hadn't heard live classical music in longer than I care to admit. We all went out to dinner at an Itialian restaraunt where I saw an old guy eating dinner with a head-mounted flashlight on his forehead. The food was good too, but the guy is more blog-worthy.

We went to see Michael performing in one of a series of vocal groups in the evening. Most of them were fun and entertaining, save for the first, the (group)*. Their style hearkens back to a day when gay wasn't analagous to being fabulous or talented. And just because the song "Good bye my Coney Island Baby" is an old standard, that doesn't mean it was ever a good song. My enthusiasm for traditional acapella music is normally strained at best, and Michael tells me that one of the guys in the group is a dick, so in my estimation the whole lot of the limp-wristed bluebloods can sod off. The other groups were great, though. They sang for the sheer love of it, and one group even did a humorous reinactment of a scene from The Lion King.

I got to meet Rebekah, whom Michael is quite taken with. She's nice, and every bit the introvert that I am when I'm not around my family. She reminded me of a young Audrey Hepburn (see Charade), if that means anything. I met the Greek professor, who imeediately identified me as a grad student (wether by conspicuous black bag or emmaciated physique, I don't know). I saw Michael's suitemate in passing on an elevator, and then later on I saw someone that we assume to be related to his suitemate alseep on the couch. We went to a midnight pancake breakfastand ate until the smoke alarm went off from the cooking.

I'll probably post some pictures of this trip later tonight or tomorrow when I can get them off of my camera. It's time I stopped abusing the free wi-fi and went to find my family in their various locations.

*edit, 5-12-06: While I enjoy the churlish ability to scattershot-libel anything that comes to mind on the internet, it is not my intent to tarnish the name of the group I previously bitched about in this post. Apparently, this post came up in a Google list as the one negative result, and I don't want to be that guy. That said, I still don't like most acapella- possibly because I'm an idiot.

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

And Dummy begat Dummy:

This is the first render I've done of my latest creation- a marionette for my animation project.
All of the joints are articulated like a puppet would be, and it even has kung-fu grip modeled after GI Joe circa 1968. My next challenge is to build a skeleton for it and make a cloth kimono that will move realistically, then see if I can make some sort of gravity field. If I actually totaled up my list of problems with this project it would come to 99 (one external issue not germane to the project is conspicuously absent), ergo I have little time for anything else.

Some schools throw you out for having this much fun.

Friday, October 07, 2005

Serenity was awesome. Comparing it on its own merits to the Star Wars prequels on their own merits, Serenity is a better movie. I think it helps to have seen the Firefly TV series that precedes the movie, but most people I've talked to disagree.

I'm really tired. My days are filled with things I really enjoy doing, but I think I've reached a saturation point. I'm doing all kinds of production and tech related stuff; so much so that I barely have time to eat, sleep, or even clean my apartment, which looks sort of like it was transported from the Gulf of Mexico right now. There's a Treehouse of Horror (number 2, I believe) where Homer is sent to hell and forced to eat donuts constantly for eternity, much to his delight. That's my life right now- I asked for projects, and I got them.

Freedom League: I had this one on the back burner for awhile, as I didn't think it would ever get out of development. It turns out that my colleagues Gerry and Ryan are still serious about doing it, so I'll be working on this quite a bit for the next month or so.

Animation: I'm modeling a series of wooden puppets for a movie based on the short story In a Grove. The finished product will go on a DVD for my digital production class. Two birds with one insofar very large and difficult stone.

Documentary: Sunday afternoon I'm going to a meeting of the Indiana Ghost Trackers to start a documentary about them and their activities. There is some added mystique here because my partner and I have heard of other students who have started documentaries on this group, only to stop abruptly and never release any footage. What could this mean? We're grad students, though. Dogs in the refrigerator don't hold a candle to three hour methodology classes.

I'm also helping a friend of mine out with his thesis. Normally academia and I mix like oil, water, and feral cats, but here's what I get to do: I record ten minutes of me playing the top ten most popular games of last year, and get paid for my time. It's some kind of comparative study about violent video games here and in Asia. Anything for a friend, that's my motto.

Amidst all of this I'm still buying comic books. This is worth a paragraph because next week is the first issue of "Infinite Crisis," a gigantic hoopla in the DC universe that's been slowly building for years. The whole thing is being orchestrated by a team including Geoff Johns, the great comic author Gerry and I got to meet last Spring. The story so far has been broken up in small pieces in individual books, so readers have gotten different versions of the story depending on what they normally read. All these parallel plots have been coming together recently, and it's been interesting to see it all happen with what I know about story design and nonlinearity now. Is it obvious that I don't date much?

Tomorrow's my birthday. I'm pretty sure I'll be 26, if my math is right. 26 going on 12.