Question Question/ Advice Solicitation

Alright, so, didn't get up a post yesterday (but Andrew got up a post (link!) so you can read that until I find time to get around posting. (Outbreak, it's got all my favorite mechanics,* AND hexes, AND hefty doses of theme!)) And suuuure let's say it's because I'm super busy this week, that I didn't find time to do the Valentine's-day-stuff-now-on-discount review that I'd meant to do.

Been, AAARRGGGHHH, is how I've been today. I thought that I had stuff to get on doing yesterday, but today was literally nutsoid (and by "literally" I of course mean definition 2 (is there any other kind?)) On the spur of the moment, in Business for the Professional Artist class, Brother Burr created for us a new assignment to have completed: create (a) Facebook and Instagram page(s?) exclusively for our arts, link them, post regularly like we're already supposed to be doing, net 100 followers by Tuesday, offer up our arts through an e-commerce site of our choosing, and, by the end of the semester, sell something through said e-commerce site. So today I had to, I mean, I, well today, well, yikes.

But let's walk through it.

I realized a couple of days ago, may have even been as late as yesterday, that I have no obligations to my own past. I have no obligations basically at all, as far as the future goes. I may love filmmaking, and my pet project may be a fictionalized surrealistic high school memoir/police procedural, but I don't have any obligations toward it. I mean really, I love making movies so much, but how frequently do I really get to try my hand at it? Besides this semester, where I've got a motion design/animation class? I don't have to rail or derail, one way or the other, my future just to get a USA (or whatever) original television show just because some of its episodes have pretty neat whodunnits at their core, or because already I have strong stylistic conceits for the project. That doesn't need to be my future, though all the way up to this point it's been the one I've been gunning for. I could begin making a new, entirely different future for myself right now. Maybe starting an Equestria Daily-style fansite for Zootopia. Maybe I throw myself behind writing full-time, and churn out all those novels that have the cranial drifts. Maybe I could- or should!- launch that webcomic I've been working on since before I had this blog. Maybe I could do all three and more! Right? The assignment to throw ourselves behind our art and start making a profit out of it doesn't behedge our ability to do anything else outside of the semester. But it is forcing our feet in that door, which is useful to have, especially considering that with so many interests and possible futures for me, I don't have much intrinsic motivation to pursue any paths at all, other than the ones that always get me into trouble which is no good.

Just keep all that in mind. None of these paths need be permanent. Not that they can't be.

So, create new art accounts/pages apart from the personal accounts, and link them together, on Facebook and Instagram. Step 1.

I've finally managed to get my Instagram to work. I mean, it worked, and you can view Instagram without an app, but if you want to post anything yourself it requires one, which I didn't have till now. It wasn't a problem with my mobile device not being the cellphone I used to sign up for Y! mail at all- that number's connected exclusively to my Yahoo! account, and my Facebook (and by extension Instagram) have no mobile number listed for me at all. Google Play doesn't support Kindles, is what it was, even though Kindles are Android devices, (probably) because Kindle is already covered by Amazon's services including the Kindle Appstore. Which appstore does not have Instagram on it, so I had to forego the mobile app thing altogether- I got the app by going through the Microsoft appstore and downloading the app onto my desktop which is apparently possible. So that's good.

I've never used my Instagram for anything but art, so far, so I think I'm clear there.

The thing I'm stuck on is the Facebook page thing. Am I soliciting advice right now? Let's say yes. I know the technical aspect of making a new Facebook page, that's all both well and fine; what I've got questions about, and want feedback on, is the branding.

I'm leaning toward furry art, as my artistic output. It's not the only kind of art I do, nor really some second thing, but there's a built-in audience for it which helps targeting and marketing and is financial gold especially if you manage to net repeat customers out of that built-in audience, but also because really heaven knows I've got a sizable enough corpus that it wouldn't be too hard to find something appropriate to market myself with.

Questch is, would that be then, marketing myself, or marketing my fursona? By which I mean, what's the name of the dadgummed page going to be, which is it going to be named after?

I like Pretzels. As a name. Pretzels are delicious, and Pretzels sounds like Perazzo, and it's just solid all around. I got the name, honestly, from a dude who was seriously given that name (or at least I assume it's a dude, maybe it's a chick I dunno) but that was the person's actual name, and their entire name too by the looks of it. However long ago they lived, it's on FamilySearch, and is on the "names that make us go 'hmm...'" wall/ whiteboard/ corkboard at Data Quality. And I'm allowed to say that because they never had me sign the non-disclosure agreement.** And also because it's non-sensitive information of a deceased individual, and thus publicly available anyway. Seeing that name made me realize I think how much I like it, but it is- was- a real person's name at one point, unless hijinx are going on with that.

But I think Pretzels is a pretty good handle for me. It seems to go over well on WordPress, and all, and all. But there are one or two things that keep me from, as yet, throwing myself behind this (not counting the ever-present, keep that gross furry crap to yourself, part of me.)

Searching through WikiFur's exhaustive database of basically every furry ever, there's already a dude out there who goes by Pretzel, singular, already, though that's not the only name he goes by. People have similar/the same names all the time, so that's alright I guess, especially seeing that that's not his only handle. The Thing Is Though, it's a name similar enough, and looking at the dude's page he mostly does work of a, let's call it, a majority-age nature. Fairly tame, as far as that kind of thing goes, from what I've seen, and it's just this random dude, but, well, maybe it wouldn't represent a problem if there weren't this second concern I had:

Pretzels, it's a short name. The idea is I'm trying to name my Facebook page, and, Pretzels as a Facebook page name doesn't do much for me (other than maybe one for a page that designates actual literal pretzels? (Oh, yeah, I guess there is a first definition of the word "literal.")) So, what, "Pretzels artist" or something, then? Kind of a lame concern, but this deals with the name of the page itself, over, whether I'd actually be going by Pretzels online. I can't call the page just Pretzels, one; but, two, I don't want to limit the medium I do by calling the page like Pretzels Prints or anything (though that does have a nice ring to it.) Pretzels T Fox, or something, makes the name longer and all, though gosh that makes my skin crawl, and actually he's a skunk anyway, and actually he's a raccoon anyway, just with the body of a skunk (I couldn't decide, and have a marked distaste for hybrids. Shut up.)***

But then I've got another thought, engendered by the discussion of possible futures for myself, up above. As I mentioned in footnote b of this post, made 2 years 10 days ago (2 years 9 days ago in terms of this blog's timezone, but it's past midnight here,) and keeping in with the idea that ah am dang bad at intrinsic motivators for myself, I'd decided some time ago apparently that I'd start Other//half (and this is actually the first I've mentioned O/h since the post I just linked to) by the deadline of the Justice League movie's release. The JLA film seemed such an abstract concept back then, but the joke's getting less and less funny now... Release date this year, 10 months away exactly (once again going from my current time zone and not yours,) and remember I wanted to get a go on it before the movie comes out...

So here's an alternate idea: the Facebook page isn't from me as "Pretzels" at all, but I use this opportunity to force myself into getting started on something I've been wanting to do for donkey ears but have held myself back from in the name of percolation; the Facebook page is for Other//half.

But I don't know. Even if nobody replies with any advice (and I need to decide soon because like I said, I need 100 followers by Tuesday,) talking through it has given me a few ideas, and I think I know the direction I want to take.

2017 Backlog 9/15: Yup This is Backlog

Okay so backlogging right now, trying to make it both not-boring but also not, um, necessary? So that you can miss out on it and it'd be fine to? Which I guess is why I like posting up links and stuff as my backlogs. Wow. I just learned that about myself.

Eleven Thousand Fifty Fifty

Checking across all of my bank accounts and the receipts I saved, I can prove definitely that I have spent $7,486.48 on my education so far, meaning here rent, tuition, and school supplies, and actually it's probably a couple thousand more than that as well, but there appears to be a small but crucial lacuna in the form of my bank statement of january of last year, the last of my physical paper bank statements before switching over to digital. This is the month where I paid my first semester's tuition, and so there's more than $3000 that disappears from my checking account there in that gap that I can't track. $1500.48 of that goes into my savings, which leaves $1,668.10 to go to tuition, before I received reimbursement in the form of Pell Grant (the first thing that I have happening to me in my February bank statement,) which retroactively becomes what paid that cost.

The problem lies in my uncertainty whether tuition is the only thing that that money got spent on: $39.06 is the total price for preordering BARSK: THE ELEPHANTS' GRAVEYARD in both digital and hardcover when it first came out, so we'll say that first semester's tuition cost $1,629.04, meaning actually my total amount of money spent on college so far is about $9,115.52, or slightly less depending on whether I made any other purchases between when my statement provenance drops off and when it picks up again. Like I said, $7,486.48 is all that I can prove (the accessible part of the school's archive of your finances only goes back exactly 12 months so I can't look up the exact tuition fee, but the baseline seems to be higher than the $1,629.04 that had to have gone somewhere, so yeah it's all a very big mystery.) We can double-guess ourselves blind, though, so we'll just take that figure as being unmodified and thus accurate. $9,115.52.

$11,050.50 actually, if you round down (maybe using the exactly two cents I got for change one week ago) and count the $1,935 tuition for Spring semester of last year, which the Pell Grant automatically covered for me the way it's supposed to every time but only did the once for some reason. I guess we should be counting that too, even though that's not money which I ever touched? The $952 extra from that dole of the Pell Grant drifted past and glided to me like clockwork not long after. Which brings me to my second half: if I've spent $11,050.50 scholastically so far, how much have I received, and is there any excess money I've got, that would or would not be tied up into the legal obligation behind the execution of those funds?

No. There is not. There is no excess money. Even without calculating the tithes I should not have paid (I'm going to get on that later; it's easy enough to calculate how much tithing I spent, but harder to work out where that money actually came from if not scholarships,) $11,050.50 is more money than I received from grants and scholarships. Which is actually a good thing: 100% of the fundage I was legally obligated to spend on school, was spent on school, alongside a chunk of my personal cash (exactly how large that chunk is depends on whether we're counting non-official (i.e. parental) financial aid- without the latter, the chunk would be approximately the size of, my entire wages summer of '15, after tax rebate.)

So I'm out of scholarship money. I don't have to worry about what pile of economic slush I'm taking the money from when I make a purchase. I can still keep track of which of my expenditures are for school, so that I may retroactively use future scholarship money thus upon receipt, but my conscience can be clear regarding my obligation to spend scholarship and grant money exclusively scholastically.

Meanwhile, today marks the 20th anniversary of the release of the That Darn Cat remake. How auspicious!

Late

Was it a week ago? I think it was, yes. Yes, I actually talked about it then, so, the date is correct. Last Monday there was a test in Mesoamerican art class. I did well. Remember that. Just remember that. (Was it really only a Monday ago? It feels so much longer than that...)

This is what I had to write today, in posting up my project for Info Design class (due at 11:00 local time, but turned in 24 minutes after that):

My schedule is a total steaming mess right now, my punctuality in shambles around my ankles. I have this thing. It is last week's assignment. Or a part of it.

https://pretzelizemecapn.wordpress.com/2017/02/14/module-5-projects-2-and-3/

Maybe I shall continue pressing forward, until I catch up. Or maybe I shall abandon it entirely, give up, rejoice in my freedom, and fail the course.

How far are we into the semester? A quarter? A third? Halfway? I have lost all track of time, in this netherworld of constantly being behind. I have forgotten my own name. Am I Tantalus, always seeming to catch up to the assignment only for it to slip away again? Or am I Sisyphus, condemned to live endlessly repeating creating a module, only for the week to reset right as I apparently reach the cusp of the module's completion?

It's probably past the 11:00 due date as I write these words. Like anybody's going to read them anyway.

Oh crap, yeah, it's well past 11:00, I'm way late. Like that's anything new...
15 minutes behind, man I'm 3 weeks behind, or will be if I manage to catch up next week. I mean, I won't be 3 weeks behind by the time I've caught up if I do do that, but I mean, I've got three weeks' worth of work to do if I want to do that. I probably could've gotten a large chunk done catching up just using all the time I've spent rambling here and in my blog post... I am so so so so so so so so so sick of shoes by this point, though. I may vomit. 100 shoes! That's only 50 pairs, but, the way I chose to visualize them, tracking down data pair by pair, only to discover in some instances that no data exist for some shoes. All that just for one of my three methods of visualization; I shudder to begin the other two, even though they're by all accounts easier and by all accounts I do have all the data I collected for those visualizations already. But, like I said. I'm sick of shoes.

I know my true name now at least. I am Icarus, son of Daedalus, and I grew too ambitious in my visualization project. Here I am, drowning in the sea. And the expensive delicate ship has somewhere to go, and sails calmly on.

Hadn't

So I'm taking down 100 board game companies as contacts/clients to art at, for my artbiz class (tracking them, tracking them down, so sorry. Though I suppose that "taking down" could refer to recording their information, and yes it is a list, so either way I guess.) I'm at 75 right now. We're actually supposed to call one of our potential clients as well, which  sound scary but it's just talking to folks who are human beings and all. Still, I don't think I'd be able to track down Colby Dauch's personal phone number or anything, even if I thought I were worthy at all to work alongside Fernando Suarez, John Ariosa et al...

I have managed to locate a couple awesome candidates to approach though. I'd tell you about them here. Oh well.

Moneys!

I've also archived an Excel file of my monetary transactions from my bank account end. Looking at it now, I'm not entirely sure how this gets me any closer to untangling the gordito knot (it is small and fat and distinctly non-sliceable) that is my, straightening out was the term I used, of my financial aid vs. my don't-have-to-use-for-school funds. But it seemed important all up till now, so I will trust my past self's judgement.

Meanwhile for Dan Burr's "Business for the Professional Artist" class (and apparently he's the same Dan Burr who's illustrated all those glurge-y Mormon (as distinguished from "LDS") books like the one about the testimony glove and the one about young Tommy Monson setting the field on fire, which books I've never really paid much attention to because they're, what they are) (and also apparently my "Motion (Linear)" teacher Tim Howe was roommates and coworkers with my Information Design teacher Will Frohn, and is the guy who did the motion design for the Reese's peanut butter cup commercials where the bite gets taken out) we need to come up with a business plan, which means coming up with a list of 100 potential clients, and I was all, how am I going to do that, before I realized today, board game companies, yo.

And that is all.

Monopromo

That crappy little "in jail" guy drawing is so iconic by now. It's a bad little scribble, but they're never going to change it.

Monopoly promo season is here again, at participating, you know, locations. Went to Albertsons after seeing LEGO Batman yesterday, and have a tidy pile of board spaces stacked up. Didn't complete any monopolies, but I am entitled to a free pound of banana.

So yeah I guess I'm telling you all this to mention that I'm eating healthier now.

Always Be Yourself, Unless You Can Be Batman

The audience in my theater laughed heartily at all the jokes, even the ones that were only... well, I don't want to say, only pretty funny, because every single joke hits it out of the park, the entire first 15 minutes are just a solid wall of hilarity, and none of the jokes you think are going to get old actually go on long enough for them to get old... but, I mean, not all the jokes are, hearty laugh funny. Audiences are weird, I guess. I think I'm the only one who laughed at some of the jokes that others, must've missed I guess; it happened a couple of times but the one I can remember for sure was at the beginning where these guards were loading their stun guns and were all, "non-lethal!" (I think the other joke had something to do with some obscure bit of batcanon they slipped a subtle gag in about.)

The way the plot is laid out is pretty amazing- when the stuff happens, and then the other stuff, I was like, this is moving too quickly, the resolution is going to turn out to be really unsatisfying, but I didn't foresee the part with the stuff, and then the other stuff happening. Um, sorry, spoilers (there are about a grazillion plot points not in any of the trailers, so I'm just alluding very very very vaguely to them.) The first LEGO movie I also had a moment of doubt like that too, where it was all, is this story actually going anywhere but it turns out it was, so let me just compare what I'm talking about to the Cloud Cuckooland scene in the LEGO movie, combined with how Enchantress and Incubus take over Midway City just way too easily in Suicide Squad, only with the LEGO Movie resolution that makes the overtaking of the city perfectly paced instead of the Suicide Squad resolution that reveals that the plotting really is a mess (I still kinda liked that movie, but, yeah, I don't think anyone can disagree, the pacing was totally schizoid.)

This movie does just as good a job at deconstructing the idea of Batman that the first LEGO movie did deconstructing the idea of LEGO. It's a pretty weird concept for a movie, if you think about it. Like, if you had no idea what either LEGO or Batman are, this film would be, just, I mean you'd have zero context to put anything into... it's a memorable, imaginative movie, but it'd be even moreso if it made no sense.

Zootopia watch? Jenny "Bellwether" Slate as Harley Quinn. The word "jazzed" (as in, "the Mammal Inclusion Initiative is really starting to pay off; Mayor Lionheart is going to be so jazzed") gets used several times, with a lantern hung on it each scene it happens. Dick at one point briefly says "o-m-gosh," as in Clawhauser's exclamation "o-m-goodness."

WAG the (oh my) Dog

Write what you know. Alright. What I know is, Marvel's LEGION premiered tonight on FX, and I have no idea what the deal with it is, but I'm kind of angry(?) at it because it means that any TV series made of Brandon Sanderson's Legion books are going to have to be renamed*. I also know I'm totally going to go see the LEGO Batman Movie Thursday previews tomorrow. And that's it. Those are the two things I know.

I've already mentioned my undying love for WAG, so no need to burden you with that regalia again (regalia=that which is regaled, right??). The LEGO Batman Movie's really the only movie I'm looking forward to this year, barring the My Little Pony movie and a couple others I've also brought up in previous posts (though, rule of thumb, if there are any movies that make you think, hmm, that seems right up Eric's alley**: yes, yes they are.***)

I'm no great fan of Spinjitzu, but even the Ninjago movie's going to be awesome, and apparently also coming out this year. The trailer dropped today/yesterday, and I've seen it several times already. And so should you.

Crazy story, though! That scene there, starting 1:36 into it, where they're all exclaiming "Garmadon" as Garmadon appears? At first I misheard it as being, a very very weird gag: the pretzel lady goes, ermahgerd, the guy with the hot dog guy says, oh my dog, the lady with the baby says, oh my gosh, with the actual OMG going to the baby! Kinda like that mime from the Angry Birds movie, I guess, but, with a baby instead, and with a different setup.

Weeeird joke.

BYU-Pathway Worldwide Announcement

Maybe today I did so much stupid stuff I regret that it strains credulity that this day even happened. Even the good stuff is hard to believe: I went to the store with exactly one $20 bill in my pocket and none else, and my bill came out to $19.98.

So Elder Dallin H Oaks gave the devotional today. I never go to the BYU-I devotionals on Tuesdays, because nothing ever happens during them and most semesters my Tuesdays are the perfect level of busy that I need to skip them. But I made it this time- along with (almost) the entirety of the rest of the school. I mean, member of the 12, doing this and showing up almost out of nowhere, to give the devo and all that; Elder Oaks is my favorite but I'm so used to being near the church's General Authorities because we were swimming in them on my mission, so I went really based on principle more than any other thing.

Turns out, 10:00 this morning, they (the, they, you know, them, the folk who'd do that) made the announcement, the BYU online programs are radically expanding their scope and mission, now being called Pathway Worldwide, its own thing, like the old Pathway but bigger by measures. With that, the current president of BYU-I, President Gilbert, is, going to leave and do that; I'm trying to figure out a more clear less redundant way of saying that but I can't find any. We're getting, and I think actually it became effective about as soon as it was announced, so, we got, a new university president, formerly the vice president, Henry J Eyring.

Meant to get pictures of the historic event, but, well, out of today's regrets it's pretty low on the list. I'm done talking about it.

Glad Monday's Over Now

Mondays can be a hassle, not in the Garfield-hates-'em sort of way but in the fact that like they're the only day when I've got things due, basically. And today I had a test in my Mesoamerican art class, which was fun, and there was also my religion class (which normally goes like this, I get the readings and writings done by 9:00 class for its 10:00 due time, I think I've told you once) and maybe one day I'll actually do the scripture readings on the sabbath beforehand instead of having to force myself awake to get it done the morning of... now that I've relocated my Kindle (it was under the couch cushions!) I can get myself to wake up easier, but anyway.

So Heads Up, I'm Probably Racist in This Post

I've also tracked down(?) the first issue of Animal Comics (featuring Walt Kelly's Pogo) at digitalcomicmuseum.com here or at comicbookplus.com here.

I've been reading way, way too many, public domain comic books from the 1940s, using online tools such as these, and I can say with certainty:

• Japanese people are bad news, alright man, I mean they look and talk different from us and their favorite hobby is apparently sabotage, so, just, like, stay away
• Buy war bonds and stamps!
• The Jitterbug will never die
• I'm also suspicious of black people come to think of it

...It strayed into "dude, not funny" territory somewhere there. Sorry. (And would it be alright to make a joke about how it started getting offensive at the mention of the Jitterbug? I'm really not sure if that crosses the line again, or makes the actual linecrossing alright due to some mysterious confluence of comedic forces.)

If you find such lack of self-awareness funny, the cheerfully offensive racial stereotypes are really some of the funniest parts of these funny books. Probably more than partially because their taste of humor back then was so corny that you can't help but feel that you're reading just a parody of 1940s comic books rather than the real deal, of course... but on the other hand, you'd figure they'd be more racist if they really were parodies of 1940s comic books- the apparent racism in them generally just sticks to character design. You saw Bumbazine, right? Protagonist, well-written as a person, but I don't think anyone would be able to get away with a character quite so full-lipped or anything anymore outside of parody. 

I remember reading (and reading about) some of the more blatant, un-self-aware casual racism at Comics Should be Good at CBR, but CBR's like updated their site and whole layout since last I've been, which makes navigating through their old blogs remarkably confusing. They've got the old version on the Wayback Machine, of course, which was crucial into my rediscovery of some Japanese horror comics I discovered on CSBG a while back, so I could try there, but right now just going from memory?: there was something like, fun fact black people don't actually have whiter teeth, they've just got darker skin which makes their teeth appear whiter!

See, what did I tell you, that's just so cheerfully un-self-aware that it's funny.

So if you follow my pretzelizemecapn.wordpress.com blog you'd know, or actually just read Monday's entry on this blog, but I'm trying to track down shoes made in each state, and I'm having a honey of a go at it because it looks like, not every state has at least one shoe manufacturing company. 

But at least Alabama has this pair of shoes written about here:

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/14910

I have not the time to summarize that article, so just click on it. It's the most amazing thing I've read all day, including the, public domain comic books and everything.

The Pogo-Gos

I found this, awhile ago, but hadn't posted it up till now, but hey, it's the first appearance of Walt Kelly's "Pogo" on Archive.org! It's... it's kind of different; I mean, the whole thing, changes a lot from its inception here to the comic strip appearances. The art style gemps up, the kid goes away, "gemps" becomes a real word and not some typo I just made for "gets bumped," etc.

I mean good glory look at that.

And here we have the latest video from remix person Nick "Pogo" Bertke. Yay awesome things!

UPDATE 2 days later: also Pogo is apparently the name of a children's television network in India; teacher showed us this on Motionographer as an example of excellence in motion design in my intro to linear motion design class: http://motionographer.com/quickie/pogo-rebrand/ and of course now we're assigned to do something similar, at least with the way that the letterform motion is handled.

Three Reviews of Maya-Related Things I Wrote Last Night

Cracking the Maya Code is a 2008 one-hour PBS NOVA episode about the history through the 19^th and 20^th centuries of reading the hieroglyphic writing system the Maya used. Based on the 1992 book “Breaking the Maya Code” by Michael D. Coe (who is one of the interviewees in the documentary,) it’s also interesting enough that I want to track down the original book, and the two-hour-length documentary some time, to get more detail. This documentary is interesting in that it traces the history of our modern understanding of Maya civilization, rather than the history of ancient Maya civilization itself. “History” more or less means “that which is written,” so it makes sense that the story of what we know about the Maya is tied to what we know about their writing: we had these hieroglyphs we couldn’t decode, so we had no history of this civilization until we figured out how to read the writing, or indeed realize that there was anything interesting to be read there beyond astronomical observances.

Deciphering these glyphs was 100% the obstacle between us and understanding this ancient culture, but the ironic thing is that when we (Europeans) got to America, all this history was still intact, but then we were the ones who wiped it all (or mostly) out. In the name of religion, too, which makes it even more frustrating. It’s fascinating that that’s not the only time politics has delayed/set back our advancement in understanding of the Maya code; how much faster would these hieroglyphs been cracked if Knorozov’s “Soviet” advancements hadn’t been discredited, or if Thompson hadn’t had half the ideas that he did? I think that ancient and modern history reflect each other in interesting ways. Ancient history isn’t the only epoch with its intrigues and its dynasties rising and falling, and we can see that here in modern times as well (with some flexibility in using the word “dynasty.”) It’s the work of many people who carry the work forward, some doing a lot of work by themselves but nobody able to advance alone. David Stuart wouldn’t have been able to make his breakthrough without the work of Yuri Knorozov, and he wouldn’t have been able to make his advancements without those before him, including even Thompson and de Landa, so nobody’s a total villain, and everybody did what they thought was right, even if they were mostly or just partly wrong. So that’s interesting too.

...

Tikal is a Spiel des Jahres-winning game with mechanics of worker placement, area control, and action point allowance, designed by Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer and first published in 1999 (forgive me if I get kind of technical with the description of board game mechanics; my family are pretty heavy board gamers.) In it, you play the roles of archeologists, searching for glory through the discovery of artifacts and the control of temple spaces. There's only two ways of scoring in Tikal: when the volcano tile is drawn and the scoring round begins, you get points for treasures owned (with bonus points for having multiples/a complete set) and you get points for having the most workers at a temple site. But majority is a slippery thing, and treasures can also swap hands, and you need to consider carefully what you'll be doing with your 10 action points allowed, especially on scoring rounds. I’m used to games with more ways of scoring, so I wasn't really prepared for how intense a game it actually turned out to be. I took photos as we went along, and you can just tell, the expression on everyone's faces just grows more and more and more serious as the documentation goes along. I played it with my brother Ryan (who’s a roommate of mine,) his friend, and her fiancé. You can also play it with three or two people, and I hear that it scales down well, but I wanted to play with more people. Ryan won, but you can pretend I won if it makes you think higher of me (I did come in second.)

Did I learn anything about Maya culture from it? I wasn’t sure about the theme being about archeology at first; I was expecting more about ancient culture itself, but there are also novels and movies we can review for points that are about archeology, and archeology is how we find out about these civilizations, how we interface with them, so it’s important. As far as thematic accuracy goes, there’s three of each treasure and I’m not sure how much sense that makes- maybe if you pretend that they’re three similar pieces, the museums and collectors would go gaga over a set like that, so they’re worth more points, but the game art has the pieces all identical, not that you can blame them. I don’t recognize any of the individual artifacts, but I wouldn’t doubt them to be based on real finds. Also, there aren’t any volcanoes in Guatemala as far north as Tikal is, or in Mexico as far east, but there are Mesoamerican volcanoes.

...

I watched the 2006 History Channel documentary “The Maya: Death Empire,” from the “Engineering an Empire” series. It uses modern Maya people to reenact ancient Maya, sometimes on location (though that is pretty weird because those are clearly ruins,) and it’s hosted by Peter Weller, who is one of my top underrated actors and apparently a history major at Syracuse University, so that’s neat.

The documentary moves through the history of the Maya civilization pretty quickly, with focus divided between the history of the empire and the engineering behind some of its greatest monuments- presumably all episodes of this show are like that, giving a blitz overview of the history of the empire they’re discussing, before going into something more specific where they can talk about engineering. In this case, it spends a few minutes on a few hundred years of the history of Tikal, though it dedicates more time to Palenque and the reign of Pacal the great (who commissioned a lot of buildings with a lot of engineering, and the documentary loves him for it), and Pacal’s son as well, before moving onto some of the engineering at Chichen Itza at the end.

The engineering details they provide are a little basic, upon a re-watch, and I wish they’d gone into more science on that, but their history sections go into detail about political maneuvering and the shifting alliances between warring states, so that was good/neat. They just go over that stuff so fast, though. It’s an oddly paced documentary all told, in other words. I’m already well-versed in the exploration of the temple of inscriptions and discovery of Pakal’s tomb, so their spending so much time on that was kind of bothersome when they could have been talking about more ancient history- still, it is a pretty good story, so I can’t blame them for being dramatic about it.  Another qualm I have about the documentary that I can’t really blame them for is that they’re a little misleading about the order of events dealing with our knowledge of Pakal, subtly implying that he was already a well-known figure by the time his tomb was discovered, even though we knew next to nothing about any historical details when the temple of the inscriptions was being explored. They did that to introduce him as a historical figure, and that’s only the vibe I got from it, so maybe that wasn’t the case.

Greatest Song of All Time

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The Most Worth-Reading Thing In Years (Is Imaginary)

my motivation to do anything has come and gone all day. i blame the internet. and organic food. so yeah right now i lack the motivation to do much of anything. except, sleep. Let's all use our imaginations now and imagine I posted right below this the most mind-blowingly worth-reading thing of the past, let's say, few years?

HERE RIGHT HERE THIS IS THE PART THAT'S WORTH READING

now wasn't that not a waste of your time?

so yeah i'm not sure, but i think that my taste in movies may be terrible, because i don't dislike many films, so like maybe i can tell if a movie's objectively bad if i don't love everything about it but even if i do love it it's maybe still suspect? i'm not sure if i'm actually changing the subject or not, but, man that thing i wrote above sure was worth reading, right?

Time Management, Physical Awkwardness and Other Asperger's-Like Stuff

I think the drop 8 months ago did more than shatter my laptop's hard drive, because 2.0's been crashing more and more on me. When I say that, I mean, I got my stuff in late even though I was going to get it in early, because it shut down on me as I was posting up my WordPress post, then got the blue grumpies within a minute of rebooting right as I was logging back in again, then shut down on me again right as I was posting the link to the post, all within 10 minutes of each other. It hasn't shut down on me again, yet, so it's been 10 minutes since the last time, but I'm not not holding my breath.

So I guess next time I'll just get my stuff in even earlier. Which means I'm going to have to actually have my stuff done earlier, of course, which isn't much fun, but seriously the best part of my Mondays is no longer having my information design deadline looming over my head, so, yeah.

Learning time management in Business for the Professional Artist, we're supposed to keep track of an entire day in 15-minute increments. It's due tomorrow, so of course I waited until today. Mondays are my busiest day, so it also looks the most impressive.

12 research shoes made in AL and AK, put on background music (Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood)
12:15 AZ
12:30- AZ still. It's a toughie- I think Arizona brand jeans make shoes, so I settle on those.
12:45- blog
1:00 still blogging
1:15- AR, blog. Album ends.
1:30- discover usalovelist.com, a website of made-in-the-USA companies.
1:45: CA. It's got a lot of shoe companies, but all of them appear to be distributed through Nordstrom, whose website only features images of individual shoes while I'm looking for photos of pairs.
2:00- screw this, head to bed
2:15-6:30 sleep
6:30 wake up
6:45 stay in bed, just five more minutes I swear
7-8:45- scripture study and religion class homework
8:45-turn in religion class homework; head out to art history class
9-10 art history class
10 breakfast, nick my finger open meanwhile and search for a bandage
10:15- 11 bleed, work on homework
11:15 head to class
11:30-12:30 class
12:30-head home (finger bleeding only a little now.)
12:45 computer is stupid and slow, and this tissue-held-in-place-by-a-rubber-band is cramping my animation hand
1:00 read textbook reading for animation design class
1:15 do test on reading. take off makeshift bandage.
1:30 animate
1:45 finish stuff, upload it and head to class
2-4:30 animation design class
4:30 procrastinate near end of class
4:45 procrastinate after class, head home
5:00 make oatmeal and procrastinate some more
5:15-6:15 rejuvinated by oatmeal, use usalovelist to shoe-in the remaining states
6:15 youtube break
6:30 research next shoe thing (three shoe ideas are needed; I just got the biggest one out of the way first.)
6:45 research third shoe thing. This one's the easiest.
7-8 fhe. We play signs and hot potato.
8 eat fhe brownies.
8:15 check email and stuff
8:30 youtube while I wait for indesign to load (bravest warriors season 2). more oatmeal.
8:45-9:30 indesign create a processbook module for my shoe project; plain oatmeal is nasty so I add ketchup and mustard, and can at least pretend I'm eating a burger.
9:30 youtube break again (Sherlock Hound.)
9:45-10:30 continue processbook-compile all research done during the day, crunch numbers on it.
10:30- do 9 sketches at the last minute because that was also a thing we were supposed to do
10:45- try to upload my finished project, computer crashes on me
11:00 turn in project late, blog about it
11:15 fill in gaps in day's record
11:30 reflect on the meaning of the events of the day
11:45 blog

So yeah. I discovered a couple of weeks ago that no matter how important the project, unless it's also urgent and I've already squeezed my procrastination out, I feel like I'm wasting my time if I do something for more than about a half-hour at a time. Served me right for blocking out an hour to do something, in my planner (it would usually take me twice that, then, unless I really want to schedule in unstructured time, which, yeah sure why not.)

Autistical-type folk are supposed to crave structure, but I don't know. Even the idea of even unstructured time in a schedule, for me... kinda freaky-deaky.

But the way I phrase that, unstructured time, makes me realize, maybe that's some kind of kneejerk shying away from coming across as autistic? I just, don't want to come across as autistic. So maybe that's it, something ingrained so deeply, mustn't let them discover my vasty dark seecret, that I just, reject structure for its being too, typically non-neurotypical? I don't think that's it, okay seriously that's not it. It's bedtime, right now, I should be brushing my teeth, but I've been rejecting such ritual as toothbrushing since before anybody knew there was something different about me. It was one of the things that made my parents realize that, you know? So it's not any rejection of coming across as a typical non-neurotypical, that leads to my chafing against structure.

I only brought up the possibility because that phrase, "unstructured time," that just smacks of something some TA would refer to, in giving breathing room to some little autist's, some little professor's, flights of fancy-- and that just triggers in me something I'd apparently wanted to talk about, perhaps stemming from the introspection last night, which I'd brought up but didn't really delve into, how I don't want to come across all spergery, like the phrase "unstructured time" would do. But why is that? Is it shame? Is it modesty, which I refer to as the avoidance of calling undue attention to oneself? Or, I think this is the one, is it that awkward people just make you feel awkward (or at least they make me feel awkward, in a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy- I'm rendered feeling awkward by awkward people because I'm afraid that I come across that way...!)

Board game workshop, that was kind of awkward at first a little, with all those awkward nerdy-type people there, awkwardly around that little table, before I saw the board game being lugged through the Crossroads to some other area of the foodcourt where the official workshop was actually being held without our knowledge... there were more, non-awkward, type people there, and so I felt better, didn't have to be the cool non-nerd of the group.

Is there anything bad about coming across autistic? Do I just have some heightened PDD-dar that allows me to pick out awkward traits that others wouldn't see? Elder I'm-picturing-his-face, don't think we were ever officially any kind of companion though we did twosomeize at one point, said how he had Asperger's, stressed it mild Asperger's, stressed it very mild Asperger's, which surprised Elder Judkins who said he couldn't tell, even though from across the room it didn't look "very mild" to me. I slouch and breathe through my mouth and have a (I think) funny-shaped head in profile (it's the mouth, and the neck, and the back of the head, (the latter two dealing again with the slouching of course,)) but Elder Koenig said, when I told him what was "wrong" enough with me to be on the FCHHM, that whoever diagnosed me must have been high or something at the time. Maybe I am the only one who picks up on these. I dunno.

The back of everyone's head is awkward, really. So.

Yesterday, also, during sacrament meeting, some guy speaking, whom I thought to have delusions of eloquence at the time but thinking back at all his invented idiomata they were actually pretty solid just not used liberally enough so they called attention to themselves when he applied them, seemed smooth enough speaking, waited 8 years to go on a mission so he went when he was 23, and claimed a diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome. Which made me feel. Whatever it was I felt, I don't know, but it was there. Self-consciousness? Jealousy? Awkwardness? I'm just a man in the audience, who doesn't stir at all when those words pass his lips. I think jealousy, though. My 'dar didn't twinge at all from his presence, there was not any awkwardness in his stance or frame or gestures. Maybe I'm the same way and just hard on myself. How I come across, I don't know; old videos of me can stir some self-consciousness of my own awkwardness in me, though that could be for any number of reasons. Lack of it being left-to-right swapped like I'm used to, for instance.

Ryan and I are close enough as to pass for twins, an image we don't discourage (we're deliberately, nastily vague when the subject is broached,) but one of the things that akinates us (totally a word from now on,) it has been said, is our "hunchback"edness. First off, let me say, curse you, genes from my father's side of the family, but second off: I don't consider Ryan to slouch, so if I've got what he's got, I'm guessing I don't slouch as noticeably as I think I do. Maybe I'm still kind of gangly, but I'm not sure about that either.

In this light, even this photo here doesn't seem as awkward. Which is a real shame, as I just love making people uncomfortable. Honestly can't tell if I'm joking there. Maybe I'm just tired. I'm going to bed.

After brushing my teeth, of course.

FoxTrot (Confessor) Brings the Flood

Named this post after the comic strip FoxTrot, and I guess the Neko Case album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood which I'm listening to right now? (YouTube playlist of official full album stream.) Pretty good so far; off to a better start than her Middle Cyclone, at least, as far as albums I've heard from her goes. Standouts, probably the title track, and right now John Saw That Number is playing and that's pretty good.

It's been 11 years to the day since Doomulus Prime made its first appearance, and it's been years since I thought about it but watching a YouTube video on how to hack MMORPGS which I hadn't even meant to click on, (alright so the video before that one was the one I hadn't meant to click on, but after that I was all, hey these DEFCON panels are pretty interesting, is what happened) and all of a sudden I remembered Doomulus Prime, and how awesome it was and how hard I laughed when I read that strip for the first time, so I decided to track it down and, it was 11 years to the day that that exact strip came out. Which means- mind blown- it being Sunday January 29th again for the first time in 11 years, any comic syndication service showcasing FoxTrot would have that exact strip as today's. Such as the one on my Kindle... but if there's one thing I'm good at keeping track of it's nothing, so I actually can't find that to double-check. But, that should be the case.* It takes 11 years for the day/date to sync up again, I mean that's the way Calvin and Hobbes reruns go, so...**

So YouTube videos anyway? I'm going to go long on this post, I can feel it, so I'm there we go, I just published, and am just going to have the rest of this as an update to the post, instead of having to backdate it going through that trouble.

I napped all this afternoon and evening, seriously going to sleep around 1:00 pm I guess and sleeping until 9:00. I really really really (really really really) need to do my homework which is due Monday, which is of course now today, by my time zone's standards and there we go, we just passed the 1:00 mark which means by this blog's time zone standards as well. So that's what I'm doing.

I hadn't meant to put it off, but YouTube binges called, and it was always all, welll it's not that intensive a project, and (and The Needle Has Landed is playing right now and I'm really enjoying it) anyway, I trapped myself on this one. I'd been going to get some of it done today/yesterday (Sunday anyway) (and apparently The Needle Has Landed is the last track of the album, sad) but keeping the Sabbath day holy is a thing, and was reemphasized in Priesthood, and so, like, man I can't do homework on the sabbath, no matter how easy, so I just slept then, and am awake now. Only, what was to be done there, between 9:00 and 12:00?

Well, you know. I watched YouTube.

Probably would have been keeping the Sabbath holier just doing homework. We're like little kids, you know, with literal minds. Oh, I can't do that, so I'll do this, and you make it so much worse.

But sometimes little kids, in taking things at face value, stumble across some obvious solution no one else had thought to try before because their parameters were too jaded.

In watching a video review of Ender's Game, something something Orson Scott Card something something homophobia something something something. And now I don't have very many opinions on very many things, but if there is one thing I do hold to very strongly, it's that Orson Scott Card is not a homophobe, seriously just friggin' read friggin' Songmaster, like, dang. I guess I just hold to this idea so strongly that whenever I get challenged on it, I have to rethink my entire worldview. The challenge doesn't even have to be that direct or that strong. People who clearly don't know what they're talking about, who've only heard from whatever-hand sources, just bringing it up casually, can set me off. And get me really introspective. Not even about that, just, make me think about my life.

So, yeah, Sabbath obtained, I guess.

Onte Alus-MG6

One of the things I failed to mention about the bunny hop, as well, is how it absolutely destroys your core. In the good way, of course, but my abdomen still smarts.

1

https://naturallycuriouswithmaryholland.wordpress.com/2012/07/29/white-tailed-does-still-nursing/

So the president is doing all the things that he threatened to do? Dude's been in office for, what, a week now (and this week passed a heck of a lot faster than last week did) and he's already gone through like all of his campaign promises. Whether you agree with anything he's doing or not, (obvious response to things), I look at that and am all, dang, dude's got his stuff together, now that's efficient.

Aztecpunk

The ancient Zapotec site of Monte Alban is constructed along a N/S axis, except for one building, building J, which is offset. It's believed that building J was an astronomical observatory, and, sure, why not. There are large stones around the base of building J depicting buildings atop upside-down heads, and that probably signifies the defeat of some foreign ruler. Makes sense- the building indicates a place or place name, the face indicates a ruler, the head's being upside-down indicates that ruler's deposition.

But that's no fun. When I saw the carvings, my immediate thought was, the city is actually a giant transforming fighting robot. So here's the concept: ancient Pre-Columbian cities are giant robots, actually, but dormant, with the robot's giant head (heck maybe an Olmec head) buried underground, to swing right-side-up upon the city's activation. The ancient sites/steampunk mecha get into fights, and maybe fend off an alien invasion of feathered serpents.

I would be doing a 24-hour comic of that right now, before I realized, that's a really stupid idea.

The only panel I made.

Money Matters Matter, and the Lion King

I finished indexing the receipts that were in the shoebox today, and have begun cross-referencing them with my bank account reports etc. Exciting stuff. The reason it’s so important is because, not only does Prof Burr of my Business for the Professional Artist say it’s important to keep track of that kind of thing for a lot of reasons; but also because scholarship money is for school, obviously, and I’m tracking down exactly which money was spent where and hopefully straightening out how much of the money I have is personal and how much is strictly scholastic, to be spent only on school supplies and tuition and rent and stuff (I paid tithing last year on the scholarship and grant money I received, only to realize later that that may not have been entirely legal to do... so that’s another thing that’s hopefully going to get straightened out (and as much as it pains me to use the phrase straighten out twice in a row like that, I’m too tired right now to come up with my own idiom.))

I do know for sure, of course, that my plasma money is untainted by legal scholarship restriction and free to use, especially considering how I probably won’t need to pay any tithing on it for quite a while (that all being covered last year, with several hundred to spare,) and so I’m trying to stick to what’s there for a bit, until I’ve tampered down all the dust on everything else?, even though I do have a couple hundred dollars just lazing there in my bank account (and now you know whom to rob!). So that’s the story there. Everything should be (urgh) straightened out, I think I’ll have it, tomorrow.

But sitting in my room all day wasn't that great, like I only had a couple thousand steps all day for the most of the day, so not too long after clean checks and we passed, I decided to get the rest of my 10,000 steps in for the day, by trekking out into the cold and finding adventure someplace. No local cinema seems to be playing La La Land right now, which is weird (it must have slipped through the cracks, like when The Secret Life of Pets wasn’t playing at either theater for a few solid weeks there,) so I headed beyond Fatcats to see if there was anything interesting at the DI just a blockish past. And there was.

Apparently there was a Lion King board game published by Milton Bradley in 1993? The artwork is, as far as this kind of thing goes, absolutely jawdropping, and most of the pieces were still there, and in great condition to boot. The box is kind of beat up, but the cardboard standees are all in fantastic shape, whatever the heck the word for the quality of condition just under “mint” is. Seems really interesting.

Boardgames and Bunny Hops

2.0's been crashing a lot recently on me for some reason. Giving me the blue frownies, a couple of times today (or actually I think once was last night maybe,) and just now, just, crashing, and rebooting itself. And just now just now, I'm at 10% battery, so even greater motivation to make this post quick.

There's a board game design workshop here, and it looks like the first meeting was this evening, and it looks like it's taken it a while to get off the ground, but it's up and running now (and I joined some smaller group because nobody seemed to know where it was being held, "Manwaring Center dining area" being kind of vague and big and all, until I noticed someone humping a heavy old board game on their way to something else, and followed them, and went back and grabbed the rest of the group) but it looks like we're meeting every other Wednesday for the design workshop, but a board game night regardless each Wednesday. I played a game of Betrayal at House on the Hill and got turned into a vampire when the betrayer was revealed, and then we betrayers lost; and played a (very drawn-out) game of Bang! and died but actually still won because I came back as a ghost for one turn due to some event card from some expansion, and shot the sheriff. Another game night next week, and then the week after that a game night plus the workshop, which will be about the logistics of gamemaking, including playtesting and stuff. Two weeks after that, art I think, and then after that materials? Something like that.

The bunny hop is an incredibly inefficient method of travel, is the other thing I learned today. I'm not sure if other people seriously don't get the sudden urge to bunny hop all the way back home from class, if it never crosses their mind even, or if they just, totally want to do it (the natural thing to do) but let their fears of what other people think get in the way. But it's not something you see very often, either way, which, isn't much fun at all, is it.

A surprising number of people don't know the bunny hop when they see it, is another thing. Could it really be that obscure? If someone on some future Who Wants to be a Millionaire– fine, computer, you win, plugging you in– –okay this is interesting, somehow the power cord got stuck like through a hole in the corner in the shoebox all my receipts I haven't indexed are in, or rather were in, because now the shoebox is all spilt out seeing as how I knocked/tugged the box over through my grabbing of the power cord, but, seriously how does something like that even happen, I mean, it just went like through the flap or something– if someone on some future Who Wants to be a Millionaire wins a million bucks because they learned the bunny hop from me just randomly doing it past them all the way home, well, first off that'd be crazy, but second off I can just see them in some Slumdog Millionaire-style interrogation, like, how did you know the bunny hop, and, seriously at that point, I'd just go, ...you know what, you're right, I have been cheating this whole time, because there's just no way I could adequately explain that.

Receiptage

I've been doing very little since 4:00 this afternoon, but transcribing, with an autistic single-mindedness, all of my old receipts into an Excel spreadsheet (I keep them all in a shoebox. A big one.) My FitBit is none too pleased with me.

I'm maybe a third of the way through, or a half, or, man I can't even estimate, receipts stacked in a pile have apparently better disruptive camouflage than do zebras. I do know that I've spent almost $2,000 so far. And I also know that Albertsons receipts are just really weird, like seriously there are some strange strange features on those ones. I like the thing Walmart does, though, them and not-enough other places, where they tell you not only the minute but the exact second as well, that your transaction goes through. That's a fun feature. Like having Google tell you how fast it received your results, or something...

Tuesdays are open for me; auditing myself was how I scheduled my time for this afternoon. Wednesdays are way busy, but maybe I'll be able to complete or even finish this little project on Thursday. My Thursdays, as you'll recall, are just as open as my Tuesdays, well actually more come to think of it, so. Last Thursday I took more than 20,000 steps; should make up for the only 4,086 steps I've taken today...

The Woods Are Lovely, Dark and Deep

"Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost resonates with me. I mean, not that much, or anything, but, you know, it's a well composed enough poem, pretty tightly crafted, but of course it's the ending that summarizes everything:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Obligations to get to. That's exactly it. I couldn't stay long (and how the snow was blowing,) but I still stopped to snap a few pictures (and I don't think I've needed to retouch a single photograph with this new camera, color balancing or value correction or anything I mean, and so far not even cropping.)

I'm finished(ish) with the project now, at least, anyway (https://pretzelizemecapn.wordpress.com/2017/01/24/module-3-project-1-finale-project-2/) and so we're onto something new. But I can rest now. So there.

I Discuss Hypothetical TV Shows and Then Rant About YouTube Marketing Techniques for a Bit, is the TL;DR of It

So I gave myself a haircut, and let me just say, there should totally be a medical drama-type show ER-style, only the emergency is haircuts? Like, oh man, this is a bad haircut, and they have to perform a risky hairstyling operation to hopefully fix it. But my hair looks good now. It's... a lot shorter. That's what I would have talked about last night, were I in the mood.

Really though, on the subject of what would make for good TV, I've got a great idea for a game show: by answering questions correctly you yourself get to ask questions right on back, about the answers to the questions upcoming or just whatever, so you can ask the statistical breakdown of how many upcoming questions have the answer of C, or what the answer to the million dollar question is, or if your opponent's character is Bernard... Yeah, so it's like Guess Who, as a trivia show. Came to me in a dream, I think maybe a nap dream, Fridayish morning. Pretty solid idea. You'd probably even get to pull some dope math stunts, as in the video below (you seen this yet?), doing all that logic-y stuff... (14:31.) (I haven't actually seen it in a while, but I think I would have remembered if there were any egregious cussage, so it should be good.)



A lot of caps there, in that title, and some really bold lettering in the video thumbnail... I'm sure it must be a newer thing, because I only started noticing it last year, on YouTube videos, where the video icon combines text and images, in a really clickable and usually really misleading way (you, Screen Rant! I'm looking at you! With your little red arrows and circles around things in the thumbnail, that you don't even mention in the videos themselves... I mean, your videos are better than WatchMojo's, but only by a little! That's not an excuse to still be terrible! Whatever, who even needs your opinions anyway...) Lists, of course, have always been a great clickbaiting thing, because, maybe you're going to learn something, or maybe they're going to miss one, or something, and of course they're going to miss one, they're going to miss a lot of ones, and then you'll have to go down in the comments section and interact and... I got really disillusioned with YouTube during the Summer of last year, but got over it right around the time that everyone else was becoming disillusioned with YouTube. So I could laugh at their disillusionment. Fun.

But I guess this ties into what I'd been going to say, because there was this job opportunity through Graphic Design class last semester, which of course I was not selected for, because portfolio matters, but the job was to design the video thumbnails, and I'm pretty sure also to write the inane video description in the doobly-doo, for YouTube videos for Studio C and the like? And, man, Studio C's doobly-doo just keeps getting more and more and more inane, like, seriously you read some of this crap... now that I know at least the basic behind-the-scenes, I can kind of tell it's written by a college art major, I guess... I just sound really bitter talking about this stuff, and I don't mean to, but, I just have this bile at the back of my throat right now that I just can't seem to get rid of, no matter how much generic puffed rice cereal I eat...

Job opportunities through school, anyway, that's what I really meant to talk about, before going on another tangent. You know what, you don't even have to read this stuff, I've just been rambling this whole time... Getting to the actual point by now would be too much of a tangent of anything else, just a completely different tone and everything, and the mild sense of deja vu I receive upon writing that seems to indicate that that's true, and I guess I'm stopping.

I Use the Phrase "Dragonpony Babythingy" in This Post, It's So Great

Alright so I finally managed to track down the Spike-and-Rarity-have-made-a-baby video that that little girl in the library was watching on YouTube that I mentioned in the post, Have a Doug'nut, Copper!. I can't remember why; it just seemed so important at the time. It's called "Sparity Labretto," and is an animation set to Newborn Baby from the Dexter's Lab episode, Labretto (you know, the one where Dexter's birth is retold in opera form ("ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh, what's this button do?")?) Apparently the video ends, like, seriously less than a second after I took the photo, with the dragonpony babythingy biting Spike's finger and Spike exclaiming, "Egad!" where Dad had apparently exclaimed that in the original episode because Dexter's noggin is so Buicklike.

(Is that where draconequii come from? because I was thinking about that just like yesterday evening, Discord's species is named but he's the only one of those we see. Is he then a mule? No little Discord Jr.'s running around ever?)

It's appropriate for kids or whatever, I guess, that one, so yeah I guess that girl won't be scarred, but, I'm not hosting the video or linking to it, because it's just one of many, as I have seen things in the pursuit of Sparity Labretto (there's, like, a gajillion pregnant ponies videos on YouTube, and like all of them are ostensibly for kids. Children are, just, fascinated with pregnancy, apparently. Which TOTALLY makes it less disturbing!!)

I'd originally been going to write about more than that, but, I don't feel like doing much of anything right now, aside from gently weeping myself into a terror-induced sleep.

Milderpeople

I actually missed Hunt for the Wilderpeople this evening, because there was a game night tonight, and I can always catch that movie later but game nights are once in a lifetime. Did check in down there at the Spori dungeon; place was absolutely packed. It's a big lecture hall, but they actually had to bring in chairs, and there were still people left standing.

Turns out though that "game night" just meant like charades and Never Have I Ever and stuff. And I really wanted to play Tikal again too...

(Also Catan. Haven't played that game in years, and I really miss it sometimes... I genuinely wouldn't have minded the original non-Europe Ticket to Ride, I mean...)

...And Like Everything Converges Around Cats Don't Dance, and I Just Don't Know Why...

So I saw Sing, and it was really good, and it made me realize what makes movies good, and now I'm super psyched for Rock Dog next month and then past that Spark, though I confess I hadn't heard of the latter until today, and I haven't seen any trailers for it or anything, but it's hitting the States in April, and will hopefully succeed in the places where the Ratchet and Clank movie failed?

I'm kind of planning on refraining from discussing Sing until I see La La Land, the last movie of last year that I need to go view, which viewing would holy crap wrap up my seeing all the musicals of the season to be sure so that I can fit Trolls's weirdness into perspective (from La La Land to Trolls to Sing to Moana I guess,) but also wrap up my seeing all the movies about vintage Hollywood that came out last year throughout the year (La La Land, Café Society, and Hail, Caesar!.) And having watched Singin' in the Rain yesterday, which is also of course both a musical and about vintage Hollywood (I mean come on it's the musical and the movie about vintage Hollywood,) I guess I also need to rewatch Cats Don't Dance, which is also also all of those things I just said, plus like that other stuff I was talking about above what with the aminals which can biped and speech and stuff, so like, yeah that's the other movie I need to get on watching, before going into too much depth why Sing rocks so hard.

...For some reason lately I guess Cats Don't Dance has become an animated classic out of nowhere, like seriously when did this happen, I mean look at these exactly two YouTube videos, which came out within two days of each other last year, I mean yeah I remember it was pretty good, and this was my opinion back when I had terrible taste in cartoons (read: I didn't like them so hot,) but seriously, that's just surreal how a movie disappears off of the face of the planet for two decades and then suddenly becomes relevant again, for absolutely no reason political or otherwise... (First video 10 seconds, second video 15 minutes.)

Motion Design, Information Design, and the Perils of Planning Ahead

Motion design is everywhere, and I can't unsee it, man. Education kind of ruins you. All the really impressive-looking motion designs are actually super simple to make, I mean the fancy type motion designs and everything, and the shapes and most of the stuff in the ads that you see all around us, from those annoying GIF sidebar ads to the ads actually on TV. The CGI 3D effects, well they aren't always even necessarily in 3D, but when they are, that's, still relatively simple actually, though it does *usually* require more advanced programs than just After Effects. Usually.

So I'm thinking of doing motion comics or something?, it wouldn't really be difficult to do at all, just make some art, extrude the art into layers (2.5D, it's called,) and then individually manipulate those layers, slide 'em around each other or whatever. Seriously that insultingly simple, and it looks great. Figure it's a combination of some of both my passions and my strengths, and technically counts as graphic design so could maybe even make good portfolio pieces/a direction for my field within graphic design. Because it's a broad category, a big field that encompasses a lot and continues to grow to encompass even more, and having a specific field of interest and speciality is way more likely to get you places (such as a BFA.)

So I don't know. It's something I'm looking into doing anyway, and we'll see how it turns out, and if it can go into any portfolio or something. Seems like a pretty good idea I guess. If I don't seem that convicted, it's just because I like to keep my future options open?

I'm eating a lot of ramen lately. Trying to save up my money for this bad boy, donate $100 and get an exclusive t-shirt out of the deal, plus that whole chance-to-maybe-meet-Wes-Anderson-and-be-in-one-of-his-movies thing. Thought I'd have enough saved by the end of this week, but there was some stupid scheduling thing at the plasma center, where it's been a year since I started there and so it was time to get a physical, which I thought I'd scheduled but it turns out that that only got put into the computer system and never got written into the official analogue appointment schedule, so it didn't count as getting scheduled in the first place, and so I missed the plasma money opportunities of all of last week (which included a $10 bonus,) and so there was $50 there I spent on groceries last week I'd thought I'd more than make up for but then the scheduling thing happened and so like I had a bunch of unnecessarily non-ramen groceries (I'm also getting in frozen vegetables)... So it'll be like the week after next when I'll have enough money again, but I'm just $10 off from having it by the end of next week, which is terrible because there's $10 I did not actually spend on groceries actually only spending $40, and getting $10 cash back, then using that $10 last week to buy a ticket for TCM's special presentation this evening of Singin' in the Rain at 7:00, which turns out to have been the time there's this Google Hangouts thing for Information Design, which I thought was at 6:00 so yeah totally I'd be able to do both, but that turns out to mean 6:00 Pacific time which is 7:00 here, so there I was waiting outside Paradise Donuts next door to Paramount 5, in the cold, with the laptop open, and the webcam on, using the donut place's wifi, at 7:00, as Singin' in the Rain began, waiting to see if anyone else would enter the group, which it doesn't look like anyone did, so I could go catch the beginning of the movie. And I got the ticket because I love the movies, but I needed that $10 I actually spent also because I love the movies, and there wouldn't have been that conflict of interest in the first place had I not bought that ticket last week, and I wouldn't have bought that ticket last week if I hadn't been planning ahead.

So don't plan ahead. It only winds you up in stupid places, like webcamming outside of a donut shop in subfreezing temperatures as your movie's starting.

Lemons???

My hands are on fire a little, because lotion gets into cracked skin. But the fire's dying down, and lotion is a wonderful thing to have in this weather. Which is to say, cold. It hasn't snowed in, a few days I suppose; whatever gizmo they put into you to gauge time was never put into me, but it was definitely between the start of this week and the start of the semester.

It's, well I guess I don't see it often or ever, but it's well engrained in my mind enough to call it something of a cliche, let's settle on "trope" then, that everyone driving faster than you is crazy and everyone driving slower than you is a moron; those more devout than I are zealots and those less devout than I are nigh godless. Given. Has this principle, though, ever been applied to character generation/character interactions? Should give it a shot sometime; I wonder if there are defined general categories those would be in, or if that kind of thing applies to different specific traits that would vary from person to person, attitudes on various actual things. I guess I'll just have to pay attention to my own attitudes on people with different thresholds from my own, and try and quantify what those thresholds may be...

Alright, so, today was kind of not-very-productive for me schoolwork-wise, not that it had to be. I should zebrasnatch (zebra collective nouns: herd, dazzle, zeal) if I want a headstart on actually doing stuff tomorrow, so... g'night.

When the Bushes and the Bombs Are Pretzelized

So hey it looks like there's a new post up on Pretzelize Me Cap'n.

https://pretzelizemecapn.wordpress.com/2017/01/17/module-2-project-1-refinement-1/

The module itself isn't that great (I misspell my own name, and the grid system does weird things to the layout of the photos,) but I'm caught up in that class now (thanks Dr King!), so I have time not to rush it next time, and the design itself that I'm working on is fairly, pretty good I guess? I don't know, I kind of like missed posting the first module, a week ago, so I never got feedback on the first drafts but I think they were pretty good, and this one (a refined version of one of them) is even better, so, maybe?

Tikal

There's only two ways of scoring in Tikal, whereas I'm used to games where there are at least three or more methods of raking in points (seriously, Terra Mystica, with its "only" three scores to tally up at the end, I find a bit simplistic), so I wasn't really prepared for how intense a game it actually turned out to be. There's more photos than the one below, but 2.0's SD chip reader is butts, spontaneously ejecting SD cards at random intervals but especially when one is about to access the file one wants from off of the SD card, so I'm lucky I managed to drag this one off of it... but on the other photos, you can just tell, the expression on everyone's faces just grows more and more and more intense. This photo was the best of all of them, taken after final scoring at the end (Ryan won, but you can pretend I won if it makes you think higher of me (I did come in second,)) so I can't really complain.

You get points for treasures owned (with bonus points for having multiples/a complete set) and you get points for having the majority of workers at a temple site. And those are the two. But majority is a slippery thing, and treasures can also swap hands, and you need to consider carefully what you'll be doing with your 10 action points allowed, especially on scoring rounds. So yeah, pretty intense.

I'm not sure I learned anything about Mesoamerican art or culture, but the game sure didn't make me lose any brain cells on the subject like some of the activities on the Mesoamerican art class "approved" list would do to you (one of the films we can watch, Aztec Mummy vs the Robot, is on the IMDb top 100 worst films of all time list.) So I'll just have to give it a good think, and maybe come up with something for my report about it.

Foxy Palm and Neighbors

Taken 11:25 at night on the last day of May, 2016, I think that the last image captured on the old original SD chip is very telling. 

I must have been painting something, I mean, I was definitely painting something but can't remember what now, probably something fox-colored, and I think lacking a paper towel wiped off the excess paint onto my non-dominant hand? Even though I'm technically right-handed? I liked the effect, for sure (it's a common enough occurrence for me to say this with certainty,) and decided to record it for posterity. 

Also capturing, in my doing so, a record of my desk and its environs at the time the photo was taken. Toothbrush pack, (Tootsie) roll of change, interior lid for a deodorant roll. Dollar bill, crumpled. Reciept. Bookmark, Queen Chrysalis art project. Dan Wells novel. Torn-out box top, blue bow tie. Miscellaneous scattered laundries. And so forth.

Cup and Spoon

As I was walking away from Mesoamerican art class this morning (pre-classical era today, clay figures from Tlatilco and Chupicuaro,) Brother Franson walking the other way recognized me and told me that they were handing out free cups of hot chocolate on a certain corner. Sweet. (It was a cold morning.) It didn't strike me until a few hours later that he was heading into the Spori to do the morning-after-seminar art demonstration (paper folding techniques,) which I totally spaced on and missed. But at least I still got that cup of hot chocolate from him, sort of. (Along with the cups of hot chocolate they were handing out coupons for haircuts if you wanted one. Brother Franson, it should be noted, is taller than his hair, so I wonder how that went.)

I later used the styrofoam cup and plastic spoon to eat cereal from/with, mostly of utility but also a little of a sense of continuity between the present and the past, something that continued to tie me to the demonstration this morning and the seminar and the open house of the art exhibit, yesterday evening. The way I sort of, refrained from eating, after Adam dired. It was both easy and convenient, and an act of scarification, commemorating the wound, honoring it by refusing to let it heal. Not that the past is always a wound, but it is always a sort of a cut in a tree, with the present being continually grafted onto it, melding into it as it takes strength therefrom. Real life, as Cailin would say, procedurally generates history. This semester's had me scrambling and falling behind, but I think I'm catching up a bit. I hope I'm catching up a bit.

SD Card Found Again

I've been really good at being tired at nighttime lately. The internet's not working on my laptop either, so I guess I won't post up any photos right now. Just write this from mah Kindle. But I found my SD card chip today (I say chip because the electronic part fell out from the plastic part,) cleaning my room a bit for inspections. Which could've gone worse, not that I was around for them (art seminar, then the open house of Brother Franson's exhibit,) so that's good. For a bit there I was just using Ryan's SD card in my CoolPix (it's got a buck of his mission photos on it,) and now of course there's the new camera and the new SD card, but the SD card that has like all the first semester stuff on it, like Fandomonium[!] 1 and everything, I thought that was lost.

I started using Ryan's, May 13, I recall, because that was the date of BLFC day 1 last year, the same day I desperately needed that photo op with the elephant whom it turned out I know, and I was scrambling around for a camera... no wait, that was for the camera itself, not the SD card... Well, I suppose I could check the metadata on the photos, because, that's wrong...

So yeah, I've got a bunch of photographs now that I thought wee lost, some of which I was thinking about only today, in fact. Like the partial tail brushing over the low stone wall, as I mentioned I had in Fandomonium: Animal Farm. Soo fluffy...

My Brother's Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper Keeper

Mondays and Wednesdays. Those are the busy days for the this-semester me; the days on which I've got three classes. With the conclusion of this Wednesday, that's every day of the week experienced this semester. As long as I've got my work done, these weekdays aren't that bad- the two ones I've had at least?

I've already had big stuff due, in my online course; I'm not going to say much beyond that other than, it was due Tuesday instead of Monday like it'd normally be, because the semester's just begun, so I'm bringing it up to say Tuesdays would make a pretty good workday for Wednesday stuff.

The fact that Mondays are a busy day, which also have the Information Design blogging usually due, means that I've made it a goal, which I completely ignored last week because I'm a moron, to have my Information Design stuff done on Saturday.

Looks like no classes on Monday next week, though, and with Thursdays and Fridays having only one class each, really easy ones to boot (but still good and super useful/fascinating!), it looks like it's basically time for a, five-day weekend. Which is the last thing I need right now... alright, I suppose I can self-impose a little structure. And not having those three classes to sweat over sounds like a good time to me.

So

Sushi, Seminars and Cinema

I know the schedules for both the Art Seminars that are going to take place this semester, and the International Cinema films that are being screened this semester. Well, first of all: today was the first day of a couple of my classes, Foundations of the Restoration and Motion (Linear.)* I now have been to each of my classes I'm taking this semester, barring one I signed up for last week which I'm taking the second half of the semester and which I'll tell you about later.

So I was out racking up a few hundred more steps and some good stair climbs for the Fitbit challenge, when I came across, in the hallway outside of Brother Raish's office, the poster telling the films being shown this semester for International Cinema. I tried taking a photo of the poster... I had on a coat which happened to have my old Coolpix in the pocket... but it didn't have its SD card in, and the few slots that are on the camera's internal storage were all used up. I checked to see if I could delete any of the photos to make room real quick... and it turns out I couldn't. Not that it was physically impossible, like the trashcan button didn't work or anything, but the photos stored there were too precious to delete.

One of the greatest evenings of my life was November 16th, 2014. I had just a few days left on my mission, and my birthday was coming up, and Elder and Sister Ejima who'd taught Japanese class on the mission invited the elders who'd attended that, and their companions, to their apartment for an amazing sushi dinner. There was rice and nori, of course, but for fillings there was everything you could hope for: egg, and SPAM, and sashimi, and cucumber, and crab sticks, and avocado... The food was amazing, the company was amazing ("you must turn on... the bubbles!"). I ate more sushi than I still think possible. Elder Ungerman ate more wasabi than anyone has the right to survive. It was a great time.

L to R: Elders Perazzo, Eyre, Robinson, and Ungerman

...Gosh. Look at me. I was, incredibly squishy, there by the end of my mission. Case in point:

squish squish

Not to mention how pale I was... that's gotta be the flash. Right? But anyway. 

I looked at the poster, and was surprised to find that I've actually already seen not two, but seen two and been told like a jillion times to see a third, films they're showing this semester. 11 days, now, and I'll finally get to see Hunt for the Wilderpeople, which my sister says I need to see and Carla says I need to see (Carla Jimison, my printmaking teacher last semester**, is the one introducing it.) Then there's The Boy and the Beast, which I've only seen dubbed so watching it subbed should be pretty great? And I've seen Samsara, which is pretty mindbending but I don't think anyone needs to see it more than once (alright, there's probably someone out there, at least one person, who'd need to see it more than once, but you know what I mean; repeat viewings are redundant, I think, once you've been exposed to what the film has to say.)

Grabbed my D3300 and got a pic that way.

Also on the Coolpix's internal memory was a photo of my notes I took during the seminar I attended my first semester here a year ago, without actually being in the art seminar class. And the photo of the packed stuff I was taking to school, before the semester started, which you may recognize from this post; that was also on there. But seminar stuff anyway, speaking of that...

The seminar schedule is just on the class's I-Learn page, which I stumbled across in Linear Motion class (which is awesome- we're animating in After Effects, and I've learned more in the couple of hours in that class than I've known from just teaching myself) trying to find its I-Learn page. So. A couple of names from this are familiar as well.

Brother Franson is speaking at the seminar this Thursday, and he's also got a solo exhibition going on at the gallery opening this week. Brian Kershisnek is awesome- one of my favorite contemporary artists. I am so glad that I don't have anything Fridays at 10:00 this semester, because I wouldn't miss the opportunity to do some after-seminar workshop with that guy for... well, I'd gladly miss it for the world, but, other classes, at least, definitely not those.

Night of the Living Social Media Accounts

With a third blog now, I made the first post in over half a year in my second blog. Figured it was time. I don't post to "a real thing." much, but the crazy thing is, there's so much to say there that I don't say, so many wild ideas that I have that always seem to fit perfectly somewhere into that little world. I never even got around to post the crazy ideas that were the whole reason why I made a post there today in the first place (the whole reason why, that is of course, besides that new-third-blog thing.) Didn't even come close to broaching the subject. The post just, wanted to be about something different.

That's pantsing for you...

So I'm trying to download the Instagram app, speaking of new accounts and all that, and it keeps telling me, this isn't the device associated with your email account associated with your Instagram. And I'm all, what? But there's a crazy story here, and it deals with not only my new social media accounts, but my old ones!

I realized today, yeah, that's right, it all goes back to the day I got this original blog in the first place. I got it because I had an email address I was forced to sign up for, making my dreams a reality from that blog-wise, yeah? And I got the email address, was forced to sign up for it, so I could join Facebook which I was also forced to sign up for. But that's not the whole story! Because I wasn't forced to sign up for those, so much as, I had them signed up for, for me. In other words, the device used to sign up for the email, used to sign up for Facebook, was not mine. It was the smartphone of some, friend I'm assuming, but I don't even remember which one. Just some guy...! He used that phone to sign me up for these things, that email and that email for that Facebook, and I used the Facebook to sign up for Instagram, and now that Instagram account is connected to that Facebook account is connected to that email account, both of which are connected to that device which isn't even mine, from half a decade ago!

So.

I could probably, like, fiddle with the diddlies, and change that, and it probably wouldn't be too difficult but I wouldn't know where to begin, and I don't think it matters much anyway because I can still use my Facebook to complete the assignments for which I got the Instagram in the first place. Looks like no 'gramming for me. At least, that is, no making posts. I can still follow people, though... James Gurney's supposed to have a pretty good one...