Outlet Final: Results

Got three hours of sleep last night. More than some people got, but less than others. I think it's just about the ideal amount of rest- long enough to keep you from being tired during the day, but not so long that you're not super loopy from lack of sleep, so you're like on a creative high. Some of my best ideas come to me in that half-wakeful early morning state, and this is a thin version of that but spread out all day.

I spent more than $50 this morning between printing stuff out for the Outlet and also nabbing that sandwich combo at Jimmy John's (right cater cornered to AlphaGraphics*) for breakfast (Lulu Club. It blew my mind.) All pages, printed out and mounted on foam core board, can rack up the costs pretty quickly.** I spent more than $20 for the donuts and sundry for my cover concept, before that, as long as we're counting how much this project has cost me other than man hours and blood sweat and tears.

So, print and mount on foam core board. Bring to class. Hang up on the walls. Everyone gets one sticky note per piece needing design solution, to vote once per piece. The design at the end that gets the most votes makes it into the final magazine, and so there's a team who has to decide in which order the winning designs are placed, and everything. There are factors to consider in doing this: some pieces need to be arranged recto and verso, the spread a certain way, for instance. There were a lot of black and white/monochromatic pieces that wound up winning this year, so the team there had to decide how to arrange those throughout the more colorful pieces, is another particular challenge.

How did my designs, on which I've spent so much thought and effort, fare? Well... I was right. It was anywhere from 0-4 of my pieces that were chosen for publication. I thought I had a shot at getting at least one in there, but, the thing is, objectively, I'm just super terrible at graphic design. Kind of an issue, when the gauntlet is to be good at graphic design. No matter, though. Because this isn't the way the story ends. It wasn't just the individual designs that needed to be chosen; there were also the group designs...

The way the teamwork works, in case you weren't aware, is this: each team comes up with a concept for the design of the table of contents spread and the introduction page and everything, then each member of that team comes up with their own designs for that concept- and at the end, the best of each of those is chosen, and a little spit polish is maybe applied to tie the disparate designs together into something more cohesive. Or, if you're the team I'm on, you don't do any of those things. In our team, TENKS (I'm the "E" in that,) we all just did our own thing and then chose the best of those near the end and presented that as our final concept. Not that we did that deliberately or anything- just, the concept we chose at the beginning was just basically pretty terrible, and so we all just kind of abandoned that individually, each of us behind everyone else's back in a way that made it at least seem deliberate. Was at least my interpretation of events.

Assigned to do something creative for another class, I brainstormed for an hour and a half and came up with a Little Red Riding Hood theme. Little Red is an idea, and the wolf/art student has to dress up as an outlet/grandmother. In the end, the idea gets eaten/plugged in, turning the lightbulb on.

intro and contents page

art gallery cover

sample page in art gallery

contributor bios spread

faculty credits

 In the end we didn't go with that one either, but I still showcase it here because there's a valuable lesson here which I'll never learn because forget that noise: if your design needs explaining, it's not a good design.

I mentioned that the story wasn't over yet- and indeed it's still not over. So here's the rest of it: TENKS won both the cover and the interior design concepts, or in other words more accurately, Natalie of our team won those things. Which means, plus side, extra credit for each of us and not just her. Minus side, the source of the extra credit is the fact that, while everyone else can relax now that they've submitted their files and were either selected or not, TENKS's work has only just begun, in that we've got to compile all of that and arrange the artwork gallery with the final selected artworks and come up with extra pages for that and extra pages for the inside covers and... there's just a lot to do. And with 5 people in our group, with the group size of the rest of the teams being 4, guess who actually got assigned zero things to do?

Yep, yep, same guy who didn't win any of the design votes either.

Which means now I've got time to watch things again. I spent this evening finishing the Chopped Teen Tournament grand finale, and watching the "Pusher" episodes of X-Files which I've been meaning to do ever since learning of my synesthesia (cerulean 2 is a gentle breeze...) Not Zootopia, and it's certainly not because of time crunches wanting to spend time this evening blogging instead of watching movies or anything else; these three ~45-minute-each episodes add up to ~2 hours 10 minutes, which means that I didn't actually save any time over Zootopia's 1 hour 48 minutes. Zootopia, I usually watch it when I do with a notebook in hand, or at least within proximity, or in theaters sometimes just taking mental notes to jot down later-- and it's snowing and cold and I didn't want to jog out into that for a notebook, back to the apartment from the lounge, when there were other things I also wanted to watch.

But maybe that's just an excuse as well. Zootopia- "So far away, and such a big city," but really it's been so long since watching it it feels weird just to jump back into it arbitrarily; I'm not sure if I'm putting it off or ritualizing it or just biding my time or what. First world problems. There are a few other of my favorite films in the shape of a man*** that I've been meaning to get to as well (Lion King, Fantastic Mr Fox, Fursonas) and also gotta finally catch The Little Prince, but I doubt this will turn into any kind of marathon-- though, heck, that wouldn't be bad either.

Last Day Before Outlet Final

I'm feeling relatively confident about each of my designs. Maybe not the cover concept- donuts don't really scream creativity- but the other ones, I may get anywhere from zero to all four of them selected for publication. Or, correction- I will definitely get anywhere from zero to four of them.

Working down in the lab is really helpful for me- up in the apartment, I spent more than a few hours, with the project due tomorrow, not working on the project, and you can see why that'd be problematic. Down in the lab it's a designated area. Plus the fonts I'm using are down on those computers, and I don't have half of them on my laptop. But even with the regular crowd of illustration majors down in the lab in the evening, that's like a good distraction, something on in the background to keep the social parts of my mind occupied while the artisticy parts focus on churning out work.

During lab hours themselves, though, I'm often not really working on my own project as dedicatedly as when it's off-hours. During lab during class, I tend to buzz from place to place, networking with the other students, really- checking out their concepts and their projects, making suggestions, keeping tabs on how they're doing and how their idea and execution is doing. Only partially for myself- if you're not genuinely interested in other people, you won't make it very far in life.

Outlet Final Draws Near

There's the whole Outlet thing, all the files (or, all of the final files) due on Wednesday. Today was the last day to review our progress so far, so in a sense the finals should have been done by today, or at least in a position to have them prepped for Wednesday.

The final project of the semester, after this huge one, was always going to be a tiny one; originally it was going to be improving upon the weaker of our two final compositions from an earlier project (remember tapeworms? that one. That one was the weaker of the two. I'm glad I only showed you a partial on that.) Today, though, it was announced that that's changed: the final project is going to be, doing the process book for this project. And since I've been doing that all along anyway, now I'm all, yaasss.

But I still need to complete my Outlet stuff, till then.

Safe Back at School Again

Alright! It was a great week at home, a safe (enough) trip back to school, and an adjective thirdnoun, and I'm pretty ready to finish out the semester here before another break from school and the academic process repeating Winter 2017, which is still such an abstraction at this point that I can actually look forward to it.

Home was great. There was even work done there; the best place of all to do homework. But that's not all that got done! It was Thanksgiving. I don't have to say much on that, I mean, you get it.

It's pretty late here, well not really but it'd be nice to wake up early tomorrow to put the finishing touches on big stuff due tomorrow (well not due tomorrow but due enough- maybe I'll explain what I mean by that then,) and then somewhere past that I'll look into posting up the posts wherein are contained the things I'm grateful for this year, which I didn't bother doing at home because there was so much better stuff to do, like doing homework and eating delectable pie.

Uuum yeah I'm going to bed now.

Home for Thanksgiving

It'd be past midnight if I were still in Idaho. But I'm not! I'm back home!

Still going to bed now obviously; it was a long journey. We didn't even fly and my arms are tired! (That'd be a heckuva lot funnier if that were actually true.)

Since we've got the rest of the week to celebrate Thankingsgive, I figure I'll make a list of 50 things I'm grateful for!

1. 1 I'm grateful for like wolves n' crap
2. 2 I'm grateful for how terrifyingly vast the ocean is.
3. 3 I'm grateful for how terrifyingly mind-numbingly vaster space is, how insignificant the size of the ocean is in comparison, to take our minds off of how terrifyingly vast the ocean is.
4. 4 I'm grateful for money.
5. 5 I'm grateful for the fact that I don't have much of it (money,) which keeps me humble.
6. 6 I'm grateful that I didn't say to list 100 things I'm thankful for.
7. 7 I'm grateful for the fact that I'm also splitting this list up into more than one post, so that I don't have to think of all fifty right now.
8. 8 I'm grateful for safesearch functionality on image searches. I should actually start using it, because things have been seen.
9. 9 I'm grateful that I'm home.
10. 10 I'm grateful to be with family.
11. 11 I'm grateful that 50 divides so easily by 4, instead of coming out like 12.5 or some crap, so that I don't have to come up with 12 gratitudes on half the days and 13 on the others.
12. 12 I'm grateful that that's just sarcasm, that math really is self-consistent, and that that one Ted Chiang story where it's not is just fiction.
13. 13 I'm grateful for in-line links so that I can link you to aforementioned short story so that you can know what the Greek I'm talking about.

The Age of the Pirate Cat is Over. The Age of the Ninja Cat has Begun.

Mah kid bro, he's the all-time Cat Ninja speedrun champion. At press time. He blogged about it yesterday, here, but since then has already shaved off a full 5 seconds (as you can see in the video below), which by complete coincidence is the amount of time it takes for me to kill myself whenever I try a handPAW at it. Here he manages to make it all the way through with only a single death; eliminate that and surely he will shave off even more time.Maybe it'll be tomorrow; who knows...

Now I'm 25, Trying to Stay Alive

I know I (will have) posted this last year too, but 1) I didn't post that yet and 2) it mentions being both 24 and being 25. So.

Look at this, a song about being the age I'm at, again. Is this going to be a thing that continues? Well, I'm not sure I know any songs about being 26 years old, so, maybe this is the last of it.

I'm a quarter of a century old. I have memories of proceedings during the administration of three U.S. presidents, and I'm pretty sure three Church presidents. It's really not that long a time; a quarter isn't that much. There were new episodes of television shows that came out the day I was born, I checked*- but more important episodes of television shows came out the day after**. And Freddie Mercury died three days after that. And 33 days after that the Soviet Union finally collapsed. And it's slipping out of my hands a bit, sorry.

It was a Sunday today. Not much happened. I fell asleep a couple of times in church but Ryan kept poking me awake. I finished a religion class assignment that was due last night that I'd started then forgotten about until getting into bed past midnight. I ate some pizza, and some donuts, and yeah some healthy stuff in there too, but that's not very interesting nor birthdayish. Other than that, I can't remember anything in particular happening today. It was kind of blah. Uneventful. Which isn't a bad thing, better than the other thing, so I'm happy.

The party won't be till Wednesday. There were the mini-festivities of last night that I told you about; perhaps I should post up some documentation of said proceedings. There was rainbow cake, to go with my Rainbow Dash.

Deep 6 Eyes

It's been two years to the day today since getting off of my mission; and my birthday is, apparently, tomorrow; and there was a Thanksgiving potluck at Skizzy's tonight, which allowed one to get in for free if one brought food for it, and I brought stuffing; and there was a performance by Apollo A Capella there; and there was a Firefly/Serenity marathon at Angela's apartment which I missed half of because of the said Skizzy's events, and they also threw me a mini-birthday party which I did not miss... but, all of this pales in comparison to the fact that, apparently I have been a synesthete this whole time.

Synesthesia, you say, oh that's where you see certain numbers or letters as certain colors, or your brain gets its wires crossed and you can smell sounds and taste colors and all that, yeah sounds interesting and I wonder how that works, that's so weird and arbitrary, eh? the human mind truly is a mysterious thing. But it turns out that you don't have to "see" certain symbols as certain colors; all it takes to be a synesthete is to associate certain symbols with certain colors. Wikipedia: "Synesthetes see characters just as others do (in whichever color actually displayed) but simultaneously perceive colors as associated with or evoked by each one." Ooh real technical reliable source, you say again, citing the Wikipedia article like that, I know, but it's apparently such a fundamental part that it's taken for granted there, like, yeah: synesthetes can see characters as normal, but have the sensation of colors evoked through them. And that's something that happens to me all the time.

I only really notice it, generally, when I'm doing sudoku (oh shoot forgot to finish the Scroll challenge this week): I find 2 and 6 incredibly easy to work around, and associate them with/against each other, because in my mind 2 and 6 are somehow representative of/represented by the colors blue and orange, which are complementaries (opposites of each other on the color wheel.) I associate those two numbers with those two colors, they somehow fit with them, they surely hang around each other in some orangey-bluey complementary color sort of way. And that's enough to be counted a synesthete.

Just those two colors; I've tried mapping out if there are any other connections before, and the result I got back was muddled and inconclusive. (7 might be brown... or red... or green? or something?) Heck, I'm not even sure of the two numbers which is the blue and which is the orange- I think it's 2 and 6 respectively, but they tend to overlap in one of those "impossible colors" sort of ways because I do associate them so closely with one another. I'm confident enough to say this though: the little Rainbow Dash toy I got for my birthday, it has 2 skin and 6 hair. That kind of thing.

Unrelated note, something that I just realized, though: if brown is just a dark orange, which it is, technically, that means I've got dark orange eyes.

Itty Bitty Berry Cone (2.0 Ice Cream Furry #3)

The cone was so small and I held it by just a thumb. 

I suppose I could have had it held by some arbitrarily speciated anthro in its paw/hand in like manner, but what fun would that have been? Well, yeah, probably a total gas, but I wanted THIS to be a special gas. And it's really kind of remarkable how I've managed to say so much on the subject already; really I think it speaks for itself.

What Next Semester's Schedule Looks Like from Here

Okay, I think I've got my schedule for next semester worked out. I'm not sure if this is a problem, but I'm only taking 13.5 credit hours, with 14 hours being the minimum you need for a scholarship... I don't think I'm applied for any scholarships (Pell grant just needs a full-time status, which is 12 credit hours) but this semester there was a $490 lump that fell into my lap and saved my bacon, and I'd hate to let one-half of a credit-hour per week keep me away from almost half of a thousand dollars like that... but I can't find any place to fit in one more half-credit, without jumping through any silly hoops or anything.

There are a few 1-credit classes, but let's go over the ones up my ally: some kind of study program, which is an individual, instructor-approved thing; an arts internship which of course also needs instructor approval; an arts field trip for a few days in the middle of the semester, which can cost anywhere from a few moolahs to a lot of moolahs; or a portfolio capstone thing. The internship thing and the travel study in the arts program are interchangeable in that either can be taken for a B.A., but I want to apply for the B.F.A. now don't I, so I'm putting that kind of thing off for now.

Maybe I can take some odd religious readings class or something, like the Ancient Temples and Temple Texts class last semester which was so awesome and which was worth from 2-3 credits or maybe even just 1 credit I'm not sure, but it all seems like a lot of trouble to go through especially when I'd be overshooting that half-cred. Looking at the Scholarship/Grant from this semester, it says 08-16 Academic- Sophomore Status, so that was probably (?) just because I, in moving onto my third semester here, going off-track this semester (like y'know the reason that I didn't get a Pell grant in this semester and had to use my savings and all) technically began my second year, which qualified me for that money- and it won't be till Spring semester that I'll need the full 14 credits, to qualify for Junior Status academic scholarship.

The schedule itself, though! What are these 13-and-a-half hours on average per week, which I've decided to enroll myself into?

There's an online Information Design class; got no idea how challenging that's going to be, with online classes it's always totally a tossup. Maybe trivially easy; maybe so demanding as to be almost impossible. I hope it's somewhere in between?

Scheduling for Monday morning was a bit of a challenge- there's a motion design class (i.e. animation) that's then, or there's Printmaking II, or, probably some other ones. But I told you about the Mesoamerican Art history class I'm taking, which is then; I sort of had to schedule the other stuff around that. As for the motion class, I'm instead taking "Motion (Linear)," on Mondays but in the afternoon; I've got no idea what the difference is but this was what was open for me, and so I took the last available seat on the roster. That's Monday-Wednesday, while the Mesoamerican Art history class is Monday-Wednesday-Friday; the art history course is my only class on Friday.

Also MW, going over noon, a religion course, Foundations of the Restoration. It's from Brother Thomas, from whom I took my Pearl of Great Price class back in Winter Semester, and who is awesome, so I knew I had to take him, whatever time period his class was offered, and schedule my stuff around that as well. I think it's worked out nicely.

That leaves me Tuesday-Thursday. Thursday evenings, once again, the art seminars (which is where the .5 credits comes from; maybe I could double-book myself in the class, write and turn it two papers?) but Tuesday and Thursday mornings, looks like, will be a Business for the Professional Artist class. And who doesn't need that? Graphic design students? M-maybe; I mean, it DOES look more like, how to sell your sculptures or paintings or whatever- but I DO do art outside of graphic design work, and I am interested in serigraphy and all that. So, that should be interesting. Let's see how applicable any of it is! (Even if it's not, it should still be interesting and good stuff to know, if only on a general, economics, sort of scale.)

Maybe it'll even be applicable to writing...

art challenge

it takes a village to tame a child

'nother thing i noticed/realized, yesterday morning- children don't grow up, they are tamed.

bro randall's 3-y-o nephew i think it was made a spongebob out of twizzlers- he's been fascinated for weeks, apparently, with the way spongebob is drawn, asking anyone old enough to know how to draw worth anything, to draw spongebob for him, and studying the drawing process intently as the grown-ups draw- getting inches away from the paper, watching and studying the path of the pen as it moves across the paper, flipping his head back to study the face of the adult as it does the drawing, shifting his attention back and forth. and finally a week ago completed it- in pull-and-peel pieces, he executed his version of spongebob squarepants.

note the length of the legs- to a three-year-old, the world is very tall, legs are very long. even when he's seen grown-ups draw spongebob with those short legs, he's "corrected" for perspective, changing the incorrect grownup version of the world into what he knows is right- legs are long, man. if a grownup draws spongebob with short legs i know to correct that. this cross of obtaining new information but conforming it to fit your worldview is- well, put that way, i'm making it sound like something adults do too, but there's a gap in logic there I've only seen in animals really. you flip the pool sideways and superstitiously expect it to stay full of water, because that's what pools are, full of water.

that reference/idea right there, comes from this: first saw this video a few years ago- it's been one of my greatest flashes of insight into the understanding of animal psychology. this bulldog Gus decides it'd be better to have the doggy-kiddie-pool indoors, for some reason. and he's smart enough to figure out that turning the pool sideways is going to fit it through the sliding glass door, he doesn't plan far ahead enough to realize that turning the pool sideways is going to drain it of all water.

 

others just watched the video and said, animals sure are funny. but i watched it and it blew my mind.

i call it superstition, like i mentioned, this insistence that if i've seen things one way that must be the way they are. superstition. the lack of understanding of actual cause and effect, substitution of your own. the way pets feel bad when there's a mess, not because they feel guilty, but because there's an if-then there that if there's a mess they're going to get punished. superstition. like my dream of being an animal, and getting into the pantry, making a mess but on my human level knowing that it was the humans' fault and being unafraid, like the fox knowing it needed to be tamed.

so when i say that we do not grow up, but we are tamed, that is what i mean.

o and speaking of the little prince, i found netflix also on the tv, available from the blu-ray player;*- i watched a bunch of chopped and an episode of cutthroat kitchen, on in the background as i did graphic design homework. i'm not in the position from really here until the end of november when we're finished with the outlet, discounting thanxgiffin break, to watch too much tv/movies in a too-dedicated manner, so i didn't actually watch the little prince, but i definitely saw it on there.

zootopia is on netflix, and i haven't seen that since it left theaters back in july. it's been longer from my last time till now, as it was from the first time till the last. march 4th till july 7th, inclusive, 18 weeks so 18*7 = 126; july 7th till november 15th, inclusive, 19 weeks minus 1, (19*7)-1 = 133. holy crap i haven't seen zootopia in over a third of a year; holy crap that fact is something i'm saying holy crap about; holy crap i averaged, let's see 30 viewings over 126 days so one viewing per 4.6 days. (and some goal in the end is to have an average of one viewing per day over the course of a year. i am woozinated.)

the lower cases

so my cousin's husband succumbed to cancer this morning. the sting of death is swallowed up in Christ, (not 1 Corinthians 15 but Mosiah 16,) so it's okay. saw it coming and all that. writing in lowercase except for proper nouns and arbitrarily on the first person singular. it's been a day.

after not getting any Outlet graphic design done all weekend, I set a goal for myself to have at least a final rough draft for each design, in InDesign. basically accomplished that. but whenever i think i've got something really good and then i see others' progress and i'm all oh man.

but hanging out with those not of my field, though. down in the lab today with Izaak Becker et al and up in the printmaking studio with Shushana Rucker (!) and Leigh-Ann King (I'm growing out my moustache again for Movember. Leigh-Ann's so far given 3 compliments, those of the all-phrased-the-same-way re: my 'stache having been shorn, Eric you shaved it looks good, but here it gives her pause- Eric you didn't shave... it still looks good, she says this time.) hanging out with those not of my field, i am rejuvenated. i do have them, the great ideas for the graphic design projects. i am a bad graphic designer, but that doesn't matter, or is overcomable, when i am with the printmakers and the illustrators and animators.

so.

I realized a few things this morning.

1. my birthday is less than a week away.

2. the last time i listened to Fleet Foxes was in high school

3. i took photos of Sean Caulfield taking down the print from the wall on Friday but didn't actually post them up; maybe i could have done that Saturday's post.

so.

Blogger i see now has a new button marked by an emoji face, insert special characters- so more than just emojis (though they do have those) you can also do Æs and Øs and stuff, and you can even draw the symbol in a box and see if they can find the one you're looking for for you. 😻 I've seen such technology in Google Translate already, so i know of its great effectiveness. it will surely interpret many of a scribble, into a special character in a blog post, now.

Throwing Away Your Vote, and Loving It

I had this Inconvenient Truth-style "hockey stick" graph which I whipped up in Excel and Photoshop, the day before yesterday, but Photoshop went like super frozen on me, so I couldn't access it until I just decided to cancel the operation on it and work from the recovery file. It's finished now. And it's pretty darn glorious (I wish I had a scissor lift right now...)

Nevada is super awesome for having the "None of These Candidates" option, and I'm surprised it's the only state in the union that allows voters to literally throw their votes away (or at least, more literally than when they vote third party.) It's for when not even the third party candidates are good enough. Voting for either (third party or just plain nobody) is making a statement (so stop with the rhetoric already?). Some people in other states just skip the question altogether when they would have voted for nobody had the formal option been available to them; this option allows you to quantify that. A full 2.6% of Nevada voters who cast their ballots this year voted for the option, which is the highest percentage ever, so far; the closest to it was a full 40 years ago, when the option was available for the first time.

Among those 28,824 voters this year was, probably not a big surprise, yours truly. For what it's worth. Also for what it's worth, and to put my voting decisions so far into context: I cast my vote in for Romney back in '12, with my literal actual given reason being that voting for Obama was "too mainstream." Probably says a lot about me. I don't know.

Man, I didn't get like anything done today.

Arrival, Story of Your Life, and Gossamer

Arrival came out today, and it was awesome. It's based on the novella "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang, like really faithfully too I was surprised, considering it's a story about, ummm, spoilers never mind; but it gets into some pretty heady areas of perception and linguistics and the nature of spacetime and aliens that aren't even vaguely anthropomorphic, in some ways that get really involved in the plot near the end. But the SF stuff is only part of what makes the movie and short story so good...

Jeremy Renner is quoted as saying that it's going to wreck you if you're a parent. I'm not a parent and it basically wrecked me; after seeing this movie I think I have some understanding, however small, of what it is like to be a parent. The love, the altruism, the joys and sorrows wrapped up so tightly into each other that it's impossible to pick apart. It's not even a subplot, in a sense it is the plot itself of the movie, but it's not something that's shown in any of the trailers, this story (the story that the original short story is named after.) I really don't want to spoil anything, but, that final line of the movie, that one word, the implications of that, why it would be said in spite of and because of everything, that, that wrecked me. I was breaking down into tears for a solid hour (by which I mean 10-15 minutes) afterwards.

If you can't wait to see it, maybe read the story first- it's in the totally awesome anthology "Stories of Your Life and Others," on Amazon here, or here republished under the film's name. There's also a bunch of other great stories in that, of course- one or two of which I've actually read, and the others vouched for by people a lot smarter than me.

And I couldn't bring that up without bringing up the other thing. Story of Your Life also inspired/was homaged in the short story "Gossamer" by Ken Liu, he of the Three Body Problem English translation* (it's getting a movie; I'm so psyched!**) You can read that (Gossamer) for free on Ken Liu's website here, if you don't want to have to pay for anything but still want to read an award-winning short story about a woman who has to try to communicate with an alien race- in this case (and I'm not afraid of getting into spoilers here,) she's an art critic who attempts to review contemporary art shows and convey them into some form the alien "Gossamers" can understand, via hand signals over this holographic lightpad deal- but right when she thinks she's making headway in communication, the Gossamers respond positively to this latest art piece- which is actually not her hand signals conveying an art piece at all, but literally the cat walking across the keyboard. It's awesome.

So yeah. See the film, or read the book, or read the short story, or read the other short story. I'd recommend doing all of them...

Sean Caulfield, Printmaker

Alright, so it is pretty awesome that Luc Besson is coming out with a new movie next summer. But it is super concerning that there's already a fantastic trailer for it out, and everything. Will we soon be seeing Spider-Man trailers spammin' at us? If so, is there any way to fight against it???...

Ah, who cares.

http://www.seancaulfield.ca/

So there was the fourth out of five art seminar this evening. Canadian printmaker Sean Caulfield- I don't have any photos of him but I did just link to his website right there. Click it up.

Usually there's a workshop the morning after the seminar, generally starting at 10:00 which is unfortunate this semester because that's when I've got art/chem, but since Professor Caulfield is heading back to Alberta on a plane tomorrow, and was in town today, the workshop was, today. Up in the printmaking lab. And, surprise! I could make that.

Alright, I did have my religion class square in the middle of that, and I didn't learn about it until 45 minutes after it started (mmm naps) and I still had a little bit of my religion class reading left to do, but I managed to squeeze in a few minutes watching him explain some advanced Chine-collé technique before I had to head off, and I did make it back to them after class as well. They were pasting up prints on the wall- one long print on six sheets of paper, this guy, posted up with rice paste which comes off really easily just rewetting it.

The print's still there- 9:30 tomorrow morning he's coming to demonstrate removing them as well, so until that time, BYU-Idaho has its own original Sean Caulfield on display.

Big Darn Donut

Everyone must have their own design for the Outlet's cover, right? We vote on the best, and whoever that is gets their cover idea as the actual cover of the publication. Yes.

I ordered a giant custom donut from Paradise Donuts, in the shape of the Outlet logo. Also, smaller donuts, some of them shaped like letters. Probably gonna do an actual photoshoot, shoot, maybe Friday I'll have time, or, well I guess I can squeeze something in tomorrow, but for now, I do have a few photos, to show you how awesome this donut is:

It's the The Zucchini of the donut world. This donut is so large that it costs the same as a whole boxful of dozen- this donut's soul is, in other words, worth the same as 12 souls of other, normal donutses. The normal-sized donuts also cost that much, in total, minus one or two from that dozen.

Donuts, though! I'm jealous of myself, for the possession of so much awesomeness...

Adam Ruins My Life

...or at least this post.

It's less than 10 minutes till the deadline to post, and I'm desperately scrambling for a quote I know I heard somewhere on one of the YouTube videos I watched yesterday- probably from one of Adam Conover's "Adam Ruins Everything" videos from TruTV and/or CollegeHumor. I just remembered which one it was, but it's too late for that, anyway. One of the suggested videos in the sidebar caught my eye...

So, sure, why the heck not. I'll just use that as my post today... Because, with less than 10 minutes to post something, I sat through this 3 1/2 minute video.

Specs!

So the new glasses. The right lense on them actually isn't in my prescription; I mean like it improves (very slightly) my viewing of fine detail on objects a meter away, but beyond that it's worse than not wearing a lense in that eye as well... I didn't find out until after I'd bought them that this was the case, because that's the lense that had the $3 sticker on them. But really, when am I not looking at a computer screen, barring of course all the time I'm in class, or taking a walk, or eating food away from computers, or taking more walks, or shopping at the store, or stuff like that?

I found a piece of scotch tape wadded up into a vaguely eyeball-shaped, eyeball-sized ball (complete with vague iris) in class today, so I popped out the right lense and the tapeball fit in perfectly- I experimented with that, my right eye just blocked out, but the lense there is still less of an eyestrain, and having a pencil for an earpiece is still far less ridiculous. (Doesn't look like there's going to be, in other words, some kind of secondary fursona guy with cyborg glass eye in his specs, to match this new other pair of glasses, any time soon...)

Trying the old lenses in the new frames, I tried that. I have no little screwdriver to check to see if I can just do an earpiece transfer from one pair to the other. These fit well. Slightly less powerful than the other ones, but they aren't ruining my eyes, or at least the left eye. And there's the, short distance thing above, again. But I don't know. As nice as it is to have glasses that aren't actively trying to escape my face, Pretzels makes me happy...

Homecoming, Moana, Power Rangers, Finding Dory vs Zootopia, Storks

So I'm trying to avoid spoilers for Spider-Man: Homecoming, and it's not an easy task. Oh, sure, it's not too difficult so far, but really I don't think I'll last till next July, especially comparing against the Moana spoiler pitfalls (Thanksgiving. Just a few more weeks, and I'll be able to go onto Cory Loftis's tumblr again.) I already know a little about Moana, and not as much as I already know about Spider-Man as a property, so I'm okayish with that, but... All this time without knowing who the villain will even be? Well, I guess it wouldn't be so bad to know the villain or anything, but, you know, it wouldn't be so bad to have spoilers at all either. It's the principle of the thing, I guess. Because it means that much to me.

I'll compare Spider-Man: Homecoming with the upcoming Power Rangers movie; it makes me feel better. Because I don't know a single thing about the Power Rangers movie other than the costume designs from the poster, and how presumably it's going to feature Power Rangers. Haven't seen any trailers yet, and posters are pretty spoilerless things. I mean, look at the other films of MCU phase 3 so far: Doctor Strange posters, vague. Ish. Yeah? Civil War posters... um... hm. Well then.

But at least they managed to keep Spider-Man off of them.

Anyway! Finding Dory surpassed Zootopia now, this weekend, as the second-highest-grossing film of 2016, internationally. Disappointed but not surprised, that Zootopia couldn't hold onto that spot. Making a lot of money is something that sequels tend to do- of the top 10 highest grossing films of all time, seven are sequels, and of the other three, two are from James Cameron and one is Frozen.

Also this weekend, domestically, Storks is just now recouping its $70M budget. What the actual heck. Lego Movie made almost $70M in its first weekend alone, and it's taking Storks, which is almost as awesome a film like holy crud, this long to catch up. People vote for movies with their dollars, but if there's anything that TOPICAL CURRENT POLITICAL JOKE is proving, it's that voters are duuuumb.

In This Post, I Take a Nap

I napped for four hours straight today. Alright, there was a telephone call in the middle at the two hour mark (these people calling me back who'd called during the art seminar which wasn't the best time) but I went back to sleep for a couple more hours after that.

Life is a nice thing.

I've got most of my credits signed up for for next semester. Have an art history class- the art of ancient Mesoamerica. Yeah, I know, right?

"Nothing Will be the Same Again" (New Earpiece, New Stylus, and Cable TV)

Been quoting Zoolander all day for some reason? And the IT Crowd. For some reason. And been braining storms for visual ideas for the Outlet project. I came up with this perfect one for St George, picture made from cracks in the desert earth type deal, and was all, yesss. I should render that.

Only in order to do that, I needed my tablet. Which I have, but it's not much good without a stylus. Which I've been looking for for months.

I went down to the lounge, I think maybe I left it there, probably at the entertainment station where it would be all technological and nobody would move it, thinking it belonged... checked the electronics bits, with the sound system and everything, and... we had a cable box this whole time? Well then. Like both Dipper and Mabel said in the episode of Gravity Falls I then watched on the Disney Channel (The Time Traveler's Pig,) nothing will be the same again. (EDIT: Everything is different now, that is. Shoot, I already titled this post, so...)

So, we had cable this whole time. I could've been not missing ABC Tuesdays, this whole time. Huh. It required some rewiring of HDMI cables, for some reason, but...

Still no stylus, anyway. I went back up to the apartment, maybe I'd go down to the computer lab where they've got the Wacoms but I don't know the stylus situation with those, I think you need your own but I saw one in the desk drawer at the front of the room there... when Ryan called me, as I was exiting programs so that I could eject the flash drive so that I could take it down to the lab. He was at the Lost and Found sale, and though I didn't need a charger cord for my MP3 player/recorder (which I used to record my interviews, and needed a basic USB cable to transfer the files to the computer and to charge,) there were also glasses there, maybe in my prescription, so that I wouldn't have to wear my earpiece-broken-and-out-of-warranty-so-customized-by-me-with-a-pencil-behind-the-ear-as-earpiece-which-I-rather-like-and-I-think-communicates-"me"-well-but-they-slide-down-whenever-I'm-looking-down-so-I-have-to-scrunch-so-they-don't-fall-off-which-gives-me-a-headache-and-sometimes-they-fall-off-anyway-maybe-I-shouldn't-have-stuck-them-in-the-oven-which-ruined-the-good-earpiece-too-'cause-it-melted-a-bit-and-warped pair. There were only about 20 minutes left in the Lost and Found sale by this point, so there wasn't a nutsoid crazyface long line like there usually is at those, and I was just heading out anyway, so I grabbed my stuff and went down to the sale.

There were glasses there- Ryan had already assembled a handful that may have matched my prescription, which was good and saved on what little time we had left. I checked out some pairs, chose one. The prescription isn't perfect over a distance, but closeup it is. There were also a few cords he'd selected for me to review, neither of which was the right kind. But on the electronics table, there...

A stinkin' stylus! Not the make and model of the missing one, but the right brand and totally compatible, and actually way fancier than my old one. Because God is a really cool guy.

There was also a bandanna, and tennis shoes, not at the electronics table but other tables of course, both of which I got. But no matter.

Went down to the lab, scanned my sketches for design ideas for the Outlet project, worked on work. Scanned some other stuff too, like this:

I've gotten a lot better at both drawing and digital coloring, from looking back at everything... and coloring digitally is so much easier now, again, now that I've got a stylus instead of just 2.0's touchpad and/or any computer mouse I decide to plug into the port whenever I'm down in the lab with 2.0. The mild sense of deja vu that I've told you that before after posting up that exact picture of Pretzels can only confirm this.

(I post to you this drawing of my fursona in the first place to point out the fact, now that I've got normal-person earpiece on my glasses, instead of a pencil, at least with this pair I no longer match Pretzels in having an art implement as an earpiece on the left side (with Pretzels it's a paintbrush of course.))

So. New stylus. New specs. Both old, of course, because they'd gotten lost, but, new. Just like, also, we'd apparently had cable this whole time, with a perfectly healthy smart card to boot.

We Break Our Bread to the Sound of Rumbled Violence

John is arguing politics against some person over VOIP, and no matter who wins, this political conversation or the larger election, it doesn't change the fact that the world is wonderful, and Neil Patrick Harris is playing Count Olaf in the Series of Unfortunate Events Netflix show which is apparently going to become a thing. (Patrick Warburton as Lemony Snicket... Bernadette Peters as Aunt Josephine... Matty Cardarople, the guy who played the board-looking gyrosphere operator in Jurassic World, as the henchperson of indeterminate gender; probably most excited for that, 'cause that guy was... alright, the pen gate opener who releases the velociraptors, that guy's my number one favorite, but the gyrosphere operator's my second.)

Thanks, IMDb.

So anyway. My class registration opened up today, for next semester, and... I'd been basing a lot of my schedule around, I think, having thought that advanced typography class is available next semester, but it's not, and like, man I don't know what else to sign up for, other than this class that isn't there that I can't base my schedule around...

So the guest lecturer for the Art Seminar this evening was Jarom Sidwell, visual effects supervisor and/or animation department coordinator for Avatar and the Avengers and Transformers and stuff. He was also a Gundabad Orc in the Hobbit, and he played the breath for this scene in At World's End- seriously, that's his breath. (Uncredited, but true. Shoved him in a tiny black freezer box (he's 6' 6'') and had him go over the lines, and composited that in there.) He talked about his job, what it's like to supervise a vis-effects department, all the different departments you have to coordinate- animation and mocap and storyboarding and production design and all that.

I think I probably had more to say on that, but that's about it.

Oh! I'm not sure if I told you this, but yesterday afternoon, I finally got the last person interviewed which I needed for the Outlet. And let me tell you... those of us who chose to design for that poem (St George, it's called, like the desert in Utah) we thought we had a pretty good handle on its meaning, and it turns out, the actual theme and message of the poem are, absolutely nothing like we'd thought.

But I only had one real visual idea from the first theory on the poem, anyway. Now that I know actually what the work's about, I've got, more.

Richter and Mondrian

Gerhard Richter says that when he's creating art, as he goes along he feels less and less free until there's nothing he can do- it gets harder and harder, and then his painting's done. Piet Mondrian wrote, "...offering him a freedom of choice... present[s] the artist with one of the most difficult problems. And the closer he approaches the ultimate consequence of his art the more difficult is his task."

So deciding what to do with absolute freedom is difficult. But choosing what to do when there's no freedom, that's even more so. These two were talking about non-figurative art of course, but that only means the realm of pure composition- graphic design is just that, plus copy and illustration. Which sets me thinking about the way I've been approaching this lately, the abstractification of the poem or story into some symbol itself, maybe parallel, maybe perpendicular.

Thinking on the symbolism of my own art then on a broader sense (so, he's trying in vain to gnaw off his past, but he's a Skinner box, so...?), I realize, maybe symbolism is... easy. Not the hard part of art. It's the part that engages the audience, so it's the hard part for them, but after the art's finished its creation, out of the author's hands and ready to connect from one mind to another.

But it's one of the most natural parts of art, to create.

November and Remembrance

It's my birthday this month, and I totally forgot about that until this morning. It's sometime in the middle, and I was more distracted by the voting stuff that happens at the beginning, and the Decembering stuff that happens at the end.

We talked in Art Readings class this morning about how artists can overexplain or underexplain their work; being naturally curious I guess, and having documented my artistic process a lot in my graphic design process books, I guess I not only prefer overexplanation but also do it myself. A work should be able to stand on its own, but if a metaphor is overly obvious just by looking at it, or if a metaphor actually explains itself in the piece itself, it's not doing its job being a metaphor very well. Having the metaphor stand on its own, but having the symbolism spelled out elsewhere, strikes the most profound balance. To me.

I've got an image, originally conceived as an illustration for one of the pieces I'm designing for for the Outlet, but which is just waaay too opaque for the message. The theme of the piece is this: coming to terms with memory, realizing that it's a part of you. Over time the image evolved, picked up a lot of visual baggage via contact with and incorporation of my own visual metaphors, until it was too complicated to serve its original illustrative purpose. Which happens in my graphic design more than I'd care to admit. Like, always, in other words.

The metaphor for the past is a tail, behind you yet a part of you. Animals gnaw off their own limbs for their survival when caught in traps, and that's how this animal is deciding to deal with its pas-- um, tail. The fox tries to gnaw its tail off, but its teeth are also the teeth of a trap, and the trap is coming out of the back of its head in the first place: the fox itself is its own trap, a wire cage, with its tail weaving up around from the base of its spine to the back of its skull.

I'm doing an intaglio print of the image for printmaking class. This is just a test print of the hardground progress; I did softground this evening for texture, and will do aquatint in the morning for value.

What I hope for it to look like (mocked up in Photoshop to gauge immersion times for the Aquatint.)

What's fascinating to me is how similar the cage imagery is to the dream I had which I've since also tried to recreate in my art, the dream where I was a caged animal, and the cage contorted me to anthropomorphic form. There's a third cage image which has appeared in a couple disparate places in my notes/art, which I'd never thought to connect to the cage dream till now- the idea that the body itself is a Skinner box for the mind, and the mind is a Skinner box for the soul. And the world is a Skinner box for the body. You think you're free only when you're being conditioned the most.

Now that I've noticed the symbolism underlying the symbolism, I'm not sure if I'll stop getting ideas about cages, or if they'll start coming in greater force... Of course, I get ideas about masks a lot, and the symbolism of that is obvious... 

With my mask series, though, especially, the ideas are the ones that find me, and not the other way around. I suppose it is also as here: though I did explicitly track down and find the idea, use the symbolism of the tail as your past and fit that into some method of dealing with it, the cage symbolism came externally- even when I decided that the tail couldn't be caught in some exterior trap, because it's not the past itself that prevents us from moving on but our memories of it, the idea didn't necessarily call for cages- but that's what showed up as part of it, for some reason.