Since moving here, I've found that this area lacks many the resources that I enjoyed in Fort Wayne, such as access to independent and foreign films. There's a theater that shows a few independent movies, but most of the really interesting releases never make it this far into no man's land. I've subscribed to Netflix in order to fill this void. So far, my movie cue consists of a couple classic movies (Young Mr. Lincoln, Once Upon a Time in America), a few favorites (Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark), and a few oddities (Primer, Oldboy). There is quite a bit of catching up to do, and if anyone would like to recommend a good movie, feel free. Netflix offers an RSS feed of my cue, and if I can figure it out, I plan to put the list in the sidebar here so that it updates automatically. Because I can.

Last Wednesday I went to the student center to see Dr. Brian Greene speak about string theory. He did a great job explaining it without the insanely complex math involved, and explained where his research may lead. The basic idea is that subatomic particles are made of little strings and shapes that vibrate, and the vibration patterns are what determine what the particle is. The size of these, as near as anyone can tell, is 10 to the -35 meters. Pretty darn small. He also talked about the possibility of other dimensions- not in a sci-fi sense, but in terms of an experiment to be performed in Geneva in the next few years. Fascinating stuff, even to a non-physicist.

Something else of note: there's a new British TV series called "The IT Crowd" about IT workers in the basement of an office building. It's pretty funny, and the network has made it available on Google video: link, and a link to the proper episode order: link

"Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair." -John Steinbeck

This is from his acceptance speech for the 1962 Nobel prize in literature. It resonates with me, hence it goes here for digital posterity.

First off, here's an embedded Google text ad from the spam folder section of my gmail account:




Spam, bacon, sausage and spam, if I'm not mistaken. Google ads work by scanning the page for any word that matches the meta tag words in their ad database. As a result, the overzealous ad script found "spam" (used as a negative term here) and served up an ad for MRE-grade meat-based spam fajitas in a quantity that could satisfy the Supreme Court, provided that Stevens declines, citing seniority over canned meat (see Marbury v. Hormel). The option of extra salsa is proposed and left to the discretion of the court.

School keeps me pretty busy. I'm working on a research paper about the portrayal of banks in the movie The Grapes of Wrath. I'm enjoying the research, oddly enough. It's a history paper, so everything is based in fact- no theory at all. The great depression was a more volatile time than I thought it was, and the writing from the era is really interesting. Tomorrow night I'm going to hear Dr. Brian Greene speak in the student center. He writes books about space and time, and people say that he was really interesting the last time he was here.

Also tomorrow- Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-men #13 arrives in my pull file at Alter Ego. Shortly thereafter it will be read on my couch, re-read, flipped through, and passed on to Gerry to sit in his pile of my comics for six months until he has time to read it.

I'm not actually dead, though the prospect loomed unnervingly close in the past two weeks when I had the flu and then a pretty bad sore throat. I couldn't talk, but it took me a few days to realize this, as I don't talk much. I came down with the flu during the last DS Halo fragfest- cold sweats, nausea, headache, the works. I still managed to win four out of five rounds either by myself or with the help of Michelle. The last round the kill count was set at 25, and the level was huge for four people, and all I could think was "I can't go home to bed until this is over." I couldn't even see straight when I shotgunned my 25th kill in the back of the head. I got home, walked into the kitchen, and threw up for the first time in four years. The last time I vomited was when I got sick and had to postpone getting my wisdom teeth removed, thus missing seeing Zwan in Columbus, Ohio- right across from the Ohio State University.

So, I'm feeling better now. Still coughing a bit, much to the joy of my lumbering brick-footed upstairs neighbor. The parents have provided much in the way of medicine and food during this, and I'm gradually eating all of it like Pac-Man.

The semester is going pretty well. I had blocked out all kinds of time to work on my various projects, and recently I've spent this time sleeping and trying to stay at least minimally current with classes.

Two excerpts from Sweeney Todd:

"Mrs Mooney has a pie shop.
Does a business, but I notice something weird,
lately all her neighbor's cats have disappeared."

"There's a hole in the world like a great black pit,
and the vermin of the world inhabit it,
and its morals aren't worth what a pig could spit
and it goes by the name of London. "


Why? Because I just read a rumor that Tim Burton will direct a movie musical version. I don't know who else out there is familiar with this particular work, but it's my favorite musical. Link to the story. It says that Johnny Depp is somehow attached, which sounds a bit odd. The titular character is an older man, at least in his mid-fifties or even early sixties. Aint it cool predicts an official announcement in a few weeks.

Most news blog sites have lists of notable events, memes, and novelties that made an impact on various factions of society in 2005. The compulsion to code and quantify such ephemera is not lost on me, and while I can't really explain this, I recall Nick Hornby explaining the phenomena of lists in his novel High Fidelity. Anyway, here is my list of things I enjoyed in 2005.

Comics:
I met Geoff Johns.
Fell- supercompressed Ellis
Loveless- Azzarello's take on Leone's western style
Infinite Crisis- I knew I'd have to read and cross-reference a lot in grad school, but not this much.
Astonishing X-men

Movies:
Serenity
Revenge of the Sith
Batman Begins
The Aristocrats
Corpse Bride
Back to the Future marathon viewing
Batman and Robin/ Superman IV double feature night
Zatoichi

Music:
the Black Keys in Indy
Spookie Daly Pride in Indy
the Tomkats at the Heorot
Charlie Don't Surf in the basement next door
Jethro Tull in my headphones
the faint prospect of a Smashing Pumpkins reunion

Academia:
more animation
a foray into true non-linear storytelling
met a slew of new students, most of whom I hold in extremely high regard
worked on a documentary, didn't actually see any ghosts
got straight A's for the first time in my life
the Fickle Peach- a great place for out of class discussion, pool, and fooseball

Consumables:
macaroni and cheese is still roughly 40 percent of my diet
spicy noodle bowls
far too much atrium food
Boddingtons- it's always nice to name-drop my favorite beer and get approving nods from worldly types
Guiness- the old standby
La fin du Monde- gotta love a beer named "the end of the world"
the brat burger at the Ram
avgolomeno soup from Michelle
pretty much anything I ever ate at Mark and Sarah's place

The sonuvabitch works!!!! Bwa-hahaha! The button states all highlight correctly, the menu doesn't jump nearly as bad as it used to! It all links back to the main screen like it's supposed to! It was due at noon, and I just got it working now seven and a half hours later, but by Yoda it's working.

You just can't rush art. Or this, either.

Last night Jessie and I saw the Empire Brass in concert in Sursa. I was pretty worn out before that from a day spent working on projects, but I walked out feeling great. One of the many highlights of the evening was hearing Rondo alla Turka played on a tuba. These people are amazing.

The documentary is pretty well in the can. I'm going to add some music that Scott and I forgot last night and maybe clean the audio in one section (weird buzz), but the big work is done. Now to finish my animation and assemble the corresponding DVD, and I think I'm done.

Here's something for visual-types and internet tab users such as myself- foxpose. It adds a little box at the bottom the browser window that displays clickable thumbnails of all the tabs you have open. Install 1.5 first, though.

The rough cut of the IGT documentary is done, so this weekend we'll go back to editing. Nothing major needs to change, thankfully, just a lot of cutting in one particularly long segment. That, and fixing the part where Greedo shoots first. We were very tired. After class last night, Scott and I went to Cheeseburger in Paradise. I really don't like Jimmy Buffett, as a cursory glance at my facebook music list will indicate, but this restaurant has it's own sort of vacuum-sealed charm. The sweet potato chips are delicious and cheap for a big plate, and the bar staff did something funny for someone's birthday while we were there- the birthday victim tucks a big napkin into their shirt collar and the employee stands up on the bar with some kind of small cake or cookie covered in whipped cream that is flung from a napkin for the victim to catch in their mouth. I couldn't see too well, but it was funny. Then some guy started playing guitar too loud for a Wednesday night, including a too-loud version of Wish You Were Here, precluded by Wonderwall. If you're going to apologize to the audience for playing Oasis, don't play Pink Floyd wrong- two negatives don't equal a positive.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.