Here are two reasons so far this week for me to feel smug: article and article. The first article says that introverts get more out of independent thought than people who require external stimuli to constantly entertain them. The second article is my favorite, though: visually-minded people have better creative ability and often filter out a lot of information.

Scott and I were up quite late last night editing our documentary. He’s a journalist, so working with him is a bit different from the artists I’m used to in a good way- he used a method of logging our roughly twenty hours of footage with a spreadsheet with tape names, time codes, and dialogue prompts. Thanks to this, we got eighteen minutes of final product done in four hours- far better than the standard one hour of editing for one minute of footage. I went home and slept for three consecutive hours before my cell phone alarm I set as a failsafe started blasting a midi version of Stars and Stripes Forever and vibrating loudly on the metal box fan in my room. I planned it that way, and I pretty well jumped out of bed to shut it off. The documentary is coming along nicely. Tonight we present it for “critique.” I use the quote marks because I haven’t had an honest-to-goodness critique since undergrad. Everybody is so nice here that it’s next to impossible to hear anything negative about my work. At USF I had a professor threaten to shoot me with his paintball gun because I didn’t have my drawing done, and later tell my then-girlfriend that he would put me in a rocket and send me to the moon if she didn’t get her work done. The scary thing is that this professor here at BSU isn’t a ball breaker during class, but her grading certainly qualifies. I want to do well on this because I genuinely care about the project, more so than any paper I’ve written.

One more thing: Firefox 1.5 is out now. All of my (cool) friends have probably already installed it, but I felt I should bring this up.

So it's come to this- I'm a media darling again. (If I wasn’t so opposed to wearing yellow and purple, I could be a Laker) Last week I got to test the new xbox for the CMD, and then I was interviewed by the CMD, newslink, and the star press for the aforelinked story. The console that I tried ran pretty well, with none of the crashing bugs that I read about on Slashdot last week. There don’t seem to be any standout games as of yet, so don’t be too disappointed if you don’t see the new console under your tree/ in proximity to your menorah/ wherever the hell the mores of Festivus dictate gifts are to be placed. My quotations in the article are probably what I said during the interview, and I must commend the reporter for making some sense of what I was trying to say in my addled, sleep-deprived condition.

Thanksgiving break was enjoyable- I got a little bit of work done, but mostly I just read, ate, and traipsed around the fort with Michael. We went shopping on Friday and Saturday, much to our shared chagrin and amusement. I found gifts for a few people, and I picked up a tie for myself because I feel that I should be regaled in diagonal stripes should I ever have cause to dress up again. I also saw two people with matching rhinoplasty bandages- I know there’s a story there. They looked like a married couple, so did they just roll over one morning and mutually decide that they were ugly? Did they meet at a convention for people who look like California condors? Boggles the mind, it does.

On Saturday night I dug out my old Fireball Island game. Michael read the rule book out loud with consideration for emphasis given by the author. We each played two pieces to make things more interesting- I was red and orange, and he was blue and purple, the plucky little amputee who lost his arm many years ago. Fireball Island is not meant for the good and noble. The object of the game is to make it to the top of a mountain with a fire breathing demon head, steal a large plastic jewel, and escape to a boat at the end. To this end, each player is granted the limited geologic power to smite the bejeezus out of opponents with strategically deployed red fire marbles that roll around and destroy players. I hope I’m preaching to the choir here, because if you haven’t played this at least once in your life, you’re missing out. Michael’s blue player emerged from the plastic jungle victorious, despite being repeatedly nuked by my Damaclean fireballs, and despite me splitting hairs over the rules of when cards can be played and some tom-foolery at the end.

Here's a little preview (no video, sorry) of my forthcoming documentary with Scott on the Indiana Ghost Trackers: I have footage of one of them interviewing a moderately mentally handicapped guy about a ghost of a little girl that talks to him though an oscillating fan in his room. The fan had no comment at the time of the investigation.

SNAFU: my animation project is behind schedule, to the point that I've pretty well jettisoned the simulated cloth in favor of solid puppets. It's a pisser to be sure, but I have to get this project done. I got the cloth to work to the point that it would hang from the figure properly, but it couldn't react to the figure moving fast enough, so the arms would move through the cloth and the garment would fall off. This isn't that kind of movie, so the only cloth in the scene will be the curtain, if I use cloth at all. At the current rate, I could have it working well enough two weeks after the project is due in both classes. The up-side to all of this is that I'm spending long periods of time in VIA-1 in AB, much like I used to do at USF. VIA-1 is a nice lab, but the room has old fluorescent lights instead of warmer incandescent lights like VIA-2 and the USF animation lab. If I could logically fit another abbreviation into this paragraph, I would.

I found this rant while browsing IM profiles, and it reminded me of my friends in undergrad.

Here's me incrementally burning my fifteen minutes of fame: iPod finger. I was interviewed last week by a collumnist for the Star Press that my boss knows and who is married to a guy I'm working with in the Journalism department, neither of whom know Kevin Bacon. The print piece has my mug grinning above an illustration of what using an ipod is supposedly doing to my poor joints. Honestly, I haven't had a problem with my joints yet, despite all I use them for. I play guitar, type, play video games, and crack my knuckles alternately all day- using an ipod isn't high-impact.

Last night I watched the Colts game with a group of grad students. We ate oven-baked nachos and cookies and laughed at the opposing team's coaches with their matching hoodies.

You've got to be kidding me. Pretty soon it'll be possible to do the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.

Halloween weekend was fun, ergo I didn't get anything done, ergo I haven't had time to blog this week. Last Friday Gerry and I went to a basement party at the house next door. Usually these are worth making an appearance at, as the young lady of the house is quite pleasant to be around, but this event had live music by a local band called "Charlie Don't Surf." Any band that takes it's name from a line in Apocalypse Now is probably cool, but these guys backed it up with some really great meandering psychedelic rock. Their setup had parts from a cardboard robot costume scattered around, and a cheesy Troma film projected on a sheet in the background. Fun times.

Saturday was the big party day around here, so I got all dressed up for the occasion. I made a green mesh apple and attached it to a plastic bowler hat so that it covered my face. If you aren't familiar with French surrealism, I'm not about to explain the painting I was dressed as, but a lot of people did get it. The first party I went to was at my boss's house, a legendary yearly celebration where they decorate the entire downstairs from floor to ceiling with Halloween brickabrack. It's funny to see what costumes faculty come up with. I wasn't the only painting there- one of the art professors was dressed as the Mona Lisa. He wasn't as greenish as the original, but he did have a beard, so there was still that element of the unexpected. One of my favorite professors was there as the obsessive-compulsive Dr. House from the TV show, complete with a few days of stubble and a bottle of pills in his pocket. My boss was dolled-up (ahem) as a goth raggedy-ann doll. I didn't happen to win anything at that party, but I wasn't aware of a costume contest until the winners were announced.

The next party I went to was in Windemere apartments. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy- just turn left at the lady who turned into a pillar of salt last week and you're there. It's a nice place to visit, especially on weekends when all the undergrads throw parties. This one had the requisite beerpong and bad music, but it also had people who knew what I was dressed up as. One of the girls was rather shocked to see me as the guy from the Magritte painting because her boyfriend was the same thing 500 miles away. I wonder what the global total was? Certainly no more than six billion. I received a ribbon for "most original costume," which means that they didn't get it either but they appreciated the effort. There was a guy dressed as the pope, and he was such a nice guy. Of course, the best costume there was Gerry as Batman. This year that goes undisputed because nobody challenged him to do a flip.