So, I finally got around to watching that honey badger thing last night, only about a year late. It seemed vaguely familiar, so maybe I had seen parts of it before not knowing it was supposed to be high comedy. Whatever. At least now I know why image search is clogged up with carefree ratels whenever I try to look up badgers (several times now, thank you very much for asking.)


   It was alright, I suppose. The video deals with a sassy nature documentary narrator explaining mostly what amounts to the eating habits of Mellivora capensis, and to what lengths it can go to get food: getting bitten by snakes for snake meat, getting stung by bees for bee larva, etc. It was vaguely humorous, but ultimately aimless, and the only reason it lasted as long as it did (three minutes eighteen seconds, if I p.jann jrpp.jynf (sorry about that, my keyboard has a tendency to switch to the Dvorak layout on me) recall correctly) is because that's the length of the original, boringly narrated National Geographic video. The production quality was lower than I expected from what people were saying about it, but maybe that's part of its charm? Perhaps in a later post I will detail to you exactly my ideas on the subject of trying to achieve as high a production value as possible.

   So all in all, I was not impressed. By that, I mean I guess it was worth watching, but I thought to be more than a little overrated. 

   I'm not saying it was terrible. What I am just saying is, there's no reason for a single three minute video to inspire greater than or equal to four different t-shirts. 

Hey Fell-a-a-ahs!

     In my geography class a few months or so ago (I had free time in that class, as I had taken it before but failed on a technicality), I did this one of Miss Kitty, the Victorian stripper (!) mouse from The Great Mouse Detective, in a state of repose, peeling off one of her gloves. I guess I'm kind of proud of it, as I did it without reference; still, I wish the scan could have turned out better, as you can hardly see her head so I had to darken it a bunch digitally and up the contrast. Once again, maybe I'll get a better version up on a slow day one of these days.

"Miss Kitty." Pencil on paper.

   (Look at those gams!)

(...and here I was hoping they would have to amputate my eye...)

   When I woke up this morning, my eye still hurt from Saturday. I checked it out in the mirror (two mirrors, actually- it's hard to see the thing with which you see, apparently) and there seemed to be a laceration there- most of my eye was red, but there was a small white line running down the center of the left side.

    Short story short, the optometrist scraped off a small piece of what appeared to be glass or sand, blown into my eye by the wind at the landfill. My eye will be fully healed this time tomorrow. As of now, though, it still feels the same. Meaning it causes me to cry.

   Downsides: Optometrist visits cost $50.
   Upsides: My eye won't die; I found some really good new artists while flipping through the Highlights in the waiting room.

Hard Work: Its Own Reward?

    I'm all sore from working yesterday. My left eye is dry (or something- it feels like there's a beam, but when I look for it I can't even find a mote) and my right haunch is... paunched? I don't know; the rhyming made more sense for the first one, but I came up with the second one first. Paradoxically, it feels best when I'm resting it, which is also when I feel it most.

   But, I'm proud to say that there's now one more landfill with more of its fill in the land than outside of it.

Hmm... I Guess I Wasn't Watching Closely.

    I pick up new things each time I watch The Prestige. We're talking about Christopher Nolan's adaptation of the book of the same name by Christopher Priest- I'm afraid I have yet to read the book, as I can't seem to find any library that stocks it, (though I do know some things about it- the characters have somewhat changed, for instance, and that it switches between Victorian and modern-day England instead of two journals.)

    It had always bothered me how the dove gets his guts smashed out. Far from being concerned about the life of a fictional bird-- just, did we have to see its tiny little roadkill of a carcass? But I realized today that that scene is essential to the film. That bird sacrificed his life for the art, while the double, his twin brother, "took the bows" above the stage. This foreshadows almost the entirety of the rest of the movie and gives a new perspective on the characters therein.

   Viewed in the context of birds as a metaphor for the human spirit, things present themselves almost at once. Birds in cages are present throughout, a pretty obvious metaphor. It's slightly less obvious that this idea is visually echoed by the Nicola Tesla designs of the fantastical cage-like machines of The Disappearing Man acts, so that when Man's Reach Exceeds His Imagination, Angier is freed from his cage, while... Well, you know. It also explains why Borden is initially attracted to Sarah's not-son, and thus to Sarah.

    Maybe these things were obvious to everyone else, but, like I said, I just got it today.

Pale Females, Dark Males

(Inspired by a page over at TV Tropes, the bane of my one-year-ago-self's schedule's existence.)

 When animators, et cetera, first started drawing critters, they realized that the sexual dimorphism between males and females of the non-human sort was not as great as it is in humans. A dog looks like a dog, basically, and there's no way to tell whether it's a bitch or a... whatever the heck you call boy dogs. Fortunately, they were not without historical precedent on the matter of distinguishing the sexes. Since males historically have worked outside in the hot sun, they have been depicted as being darker than females. Darkness is seen as being masculine and paleness feminine, almost universally. Examples of this trope can be spotted in Ancient  

Egyptian:

Via Wikipedia (link opens in new window)

Minoan:

Also via Wikipedia, but the public domain copyright says I don't have to acknowledge that  (this link too.)

and Aztec Cultures:

I'd like to think that the Aztecs enjoyed wacky sideline mascot high jinks just as much as we do today. Only with more human sacrifice. From Section III of the Codex Mendoza (link yadda yadda yadda.)

And, like I said, it continues into the animation of today:

Bawww.

Inspired by tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PaleFemalesDarkMales. This trope is not to be confused with, but somewhat comparable to Pantsless Males, Fully Dressed Females.

What Scares Me

EMP devices.

Post THE THIRD, In Which I Get Really Affected and Begin a Life of Crime

    Sorry if I came off proud or anything at all in the last post. It was more for me than anyone else. I'm still trying to justify my own existence here...

    Everyone looked up to me when I was growing up; they said to me, remember me when you're famous. Back then it seemed like it was a sure thing, an easy thing. We all grow up in a bubble, and then that bubble pops, and then we're in a slightly bigger bubble. It's not like schooling isn't the real world; it is. Go up to a wall and try to push it over and it will be made out of not cardboard, but brick. Things that matter there still matter in the outside world. The experiences experienced there are just as valid as experiences experienced anywhere else. But the bubble is bigger. Up till now I lived in a small world where I was somebody who meant something. I always knew, of course, that the world I occupied didn't mean much. But if someone from the outside looked into this world, came in and asked for someone important, they just might have found me. Now that I have a web log, though, I'm just another blogger on the great big internet. You go from this shelter to outside of it. It's like... It's like there's this thing, and it mattered to you the most out of all the things in the world, but now it's gone. All this time you had Mother, but Mother is dead now, so you preserve her body and dress up in her clothing. Such a paradigm shift is enough to turn anyone into a serial killer.

   It's like that. But it's not that.

Whoa... Trippy.

     Lying in bed last night, I realized how strange and disarming that I ever got a web log. A web log which no one reads as of yet, one designed for friends I have yet to meet. Being out here in the cold emptiness of space, it makes me wonder if what I do is even worth it.
    I want to be someone whose life matters.
    Is what I do worth it? I wasn't sure.

    So I wrote a math equation.

    W= 100p(H/T)

Where "W" is my worthiness as a human being, "p" is other people's opinion of me, "H" is my heart rate, and  "T" is how I spend my time. "p" here is .9: other's opinions of me are quite high, higher than I think they should be, but, I guess I'm a pretty decent guy. "H," my rest heart rate, which quantifies how much time I have, is around 70 bpm, which is in the lowish averages, which is good.  is The equation for "T" can further be broken down, into:

T= a(e10²)

Where "a" is art and the things I make, and "e" is edification, so I can hone my skills to make better things.     I try to spend as much time as I can being edified, but there's so many areas in which to do it: eating? Reading? Sleeping? Catching up on popular culture? I'm representing "e" here as .65, meaning I spend 65% of my time being edified in some way or another, with lulls in between, which I'd like to see as an edification of my edification. Edification times ten is 6.5, to the second power is thus 42.25. "a" can further be broken down into

a= ΣQ

Where sigma is quantity and "Q" is quality. Quality is a bit hard to measure: do I gauge it against other people? I can't gauge it against myself, since half of what I do is above average for me and half below average, with 25% falling within the top quartile, 1% within the top percentile, etc.  Measured against other people, then, I'd say I'm a little to a lot above average at arts, based off of "p," other people's opinion about me, so Q is going to be .90. Σ, or quantity, is how much art I make. I'd say I make an average of 2 or 3 arts a day.

      With Σ as 2.5 and Q as .9, a=2.25, multiplied by an e10 ²  of 42.25 to make 95.0625, divided by my rest heart rate of 70 to make ~0.74, multiplied by a 100p of 90 to make 666.

    So I think we all see the take-away from this: I'm really bad at math.

    I'd rather that than the alternative.

      I had a dream once where if I ever got a blog, it would be named "Die Like a Disney Villain." I would use it to post drawings I had done of like Disney characters and stuff. So, uh...

      ....

      I have this one so far. I posted it on kind of a short notice; it's a bit rough, but maybe I could clean it up later.

"Surf's Up." Pencil on paper, digitally altered to erase some bleed-through of a drawing on the other side. Like you couldn't tell.