Orion

The constellation of Orion has been my favorite constellation for as long as I can remember. Perhaps it was because it was always with me while I was growing up, or because it was the easiest constellation to recognize, aside from the Big Dipper. When I moved to Idaho, I was disappointed to find that Orion only comes out in the winter time.

Last night, I pulled some blankets and pillows onto the trampoline in the back yard. I watched the full moon, all halos, blotches and smears of light to my astigmatic eyes. I also watched the silhouette of the girl next door as she played with her hair for what seemed an hour. I didn't feel much like a peeping tom since I could only see the shadowy outline of her head and hands, but I didn't push my luck. I focused on the moon and eventually went to sleep.

It's beginning to get colder outside. I woke up in the middle of the night, surprisingly snug and toasty warm, save for my face, which was frozen. The first thing I saw when I woke was a broad, starry field, surprisingly undimmed by the same city lights that had dulled it only hours before. The moon was gone, and in its place was Orion.

I was surprised. I figured I wouldn't see it again until winter, but there it was, shining in a subtle, muted sharpness in the 3 AM-ish sky. Orion has always been a sort of touchstone for me, a reminder that I'm still on Earth, that I'm still me, and that all of my memories really took place. When I look at Orion, I invariably find myself sitting on the grass and staring up at it. Memories of past sittings, conversations, and mythological explanations found in musty old books from my junior high library like to swim around in my head at these times.

In the winter, it's not easy to find a comfy place to recline, so I was grateful to have seen it this morning/night. A good sign that follows a full moon is great news indeed... I wonder what the day will bring.

Are You Superbad?

Let me start off by saying that I am not a fan of raunchy teen films. Or teen films in general. They always seem to be about a bunch of spoiled rich kids dealing with spoiled rich kid problems, and I just can't identify. I've never been a spoiled rich kid, so I don't know what it's like. Moreover, I just don't feel the need to identify with them in any way, shape, or form. I guess I just don't like spoiled rich kids all that much.

Superbad was the first comedy I have ever seen in a theater. No lie. And you know what? For as raunchy and irreverant as it was, I actually had a pretty good time. It was incredibly funny, in a sick and twisted way that I wasn't expecting. The plot was your average dungeon-crawler "get-to-the-party" affair, but that's okay. I imagine that the writers watch Can't Hardly Wait about 90 times and said to themselves, "If I was making this movie, I would..."

You get a lot of that in this movie. "If I was a cop, I would totally..." or, "If I was a nerdy dude I would..." You get the idea. This concept is best seen in the character McLovin. That's not his real name, of course. This kid buys a fake ID and names himself McLovin- one word, and claims to hail from Hawaii. Although the song "White and Nerdy" was written for this kid, his story arc completely makes the movie, and yields some of the funniest comedy I've seen in days.

If you are offended by crude comedy, this movie is not for you. Superbad goes way beyond American Pie. If I had to make an analogy, Superbad would be the teenager with a fake ID buying the cheapest alcohol on the shelf for American Pie, and pocketing the change, going to the party, and drinking all of American Pie's alcohol, and then hitting on its girlfriend. and then scoring.

I guess you have to ask yourself, then- Am I Superbad?

Castle In the Sky

Alas, this is not a reference to Miyazaki's awesome movie, although I am a great fan of his. Last night, I had to give a 45 presentation to my Group Dynamics class with my small and humble group of minions. I mean classmates.

I had been reading Gulliver's Travels for the third time, and I was amused by the notion of the "Flappers" that Lemuel meets in Castle Laputa. The Flappers are basically an 18th century metaphor for red tape- they flap these strange contraptions in front of the mouth and ears of the people talking and allow them to communicate with other people. If a Flapper doesn't distinguish something, the people on the castle don't even know it exists.

I formed an exercise for the class that required them to rely on Flappers to communicate. There were two Designers who designed paper airplanes. They gave their information to the Flapper, who emailed the design to the Builder, and gave a verbal description of the design to the people designated to fly the planes.

My teacher asked, "What book did you pull this exercise out of?"

"Gulliver's Travels," I replied.

She seemed to be a bit surprised that I was able to come up with something so cleverly ingenious, but then again, I've really slacked off this quarter in her class. I could have been more of a team player, but it's a lot more fun to play the devil's advocate. ^__^

The Tinkerer

Not a lot of time here- been having some technical difficulties while getting caught up with school. I just thought I'd put up that picture of The Tinker I had talked about from the Super Mario vs. Wilford Brimley post.

The picture is line art that was scanned into the computer, colored in Photoshop with multiple layers. The background was made using Vue6, which is modeling software used primarily for terrain. The lens flare isn't photoshopped- it's included in the calculations of the Vue6 software.

I'll try to get back to popsting normally as soon as possible finals week is always a lot of fun, ya know. Let me know what you think of The Tinkerer!

Deathly Hallows (No Spoilers)

I finished the book at 3:30am and then fell into a peaceful, dreamless sleep. When I woke, my mind was still in the book, thinking about the dreadful and wonderful things that had happened. It's been a long time since a book ran the emotional gamut for me, and I can say now without fear of rebuke that JK Rowling has become one of my favorite writers.

People like to criticize famous authors simply for the fact that they are popular. I find this to be a petty waste of time. If an author manages to captivate you for seven books, she is a good author. If you pick up her book and you cannot put it down, even if your roommates become murderously irate with you- she is a good author. Out of the entire series, Half Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows were the only books I was forced to read in two separate sittings- not because I wasn't willing to stay up reading all night, but because I couldn't drive to work and read at the same time. I know I should have called in sick, and I'm regretting it now, but it's all in past.

It's finally over. I didn't think that Jo could wrap it up so neatly, but she proved me wrong. Not only did she wrap it up better than I had expected, she amped everything up notch or six and made some moves that I wasn't expecting. While I was brushing my teeth, I realized, "Now I can actually go on the internet and not worry about spoilers!"

So, without spoiling it for anyone else, let me just say this. Hermione dies. Ron dies. Hagrid , Ginny, Professor McGonagal, and Professor Flitwick, all die. Hogwarts is burned to the ground and everyone dies. The Burrow gets blown up and everyone dies. The Ministry is turned into a molten pool of hot slag and everyone dies. And Dumbledore comes back from the dead and then dies again, after killing Harry, who also dies.

Just kidding. (p.s. I was right about Snape!!!)

Grass is Greener

When I woke up this morning, my back was stiff. I think I need to get more exercise. Sitting at a desk all day is probably not the healthiest thing a person can do, but it sure beats raking asphalt.

I had a dream about some sort of road-trip that involved myself, a bunch of coworkers in some imaginary office building that I've never worked in before, and endless debates over luggage and sleeping arrangements. I remember thinking, "I don't give a crap who I have to sleep next to- I just want to get to sleep." When I finally crashed out on the floor of the ninetieth hotel room of the dream, I woke up and remembered that I had left the hose on last night.

A few weeks ago, I hit a sprinkler while mowing the lawn. It wasn't my fault, really- it just popped up and started sprinkling while I was mowing. We turned the sprinkler system off, but that quickly resulted in a brown lawn, as none of my roommates saw fit to water it. Every time I unroll the hose to practice some flood irrigation, my roommates always shut it off. They say it wastes water if there isn't a sprinkler attachment on the hose, but they've never worked construction. Furthermore, they never paid attention to how long the sprinklers actually ran when they were working.

So I unrolled the hose last night, after they were all asleep. When I woke up, I glanced out my bedroom window, expecting to see the street flooded by my idiocy. Fortunately, the lawn was incredibly thirsty, and not a drop of water made it past the sidewalk. Yeah. I win.

Super Mario vs Wilford Brimley

It's official. I need more sleep. I have four alarms on my cell phone, and I managed to sleep through all but the last one this morning. The last alarm is simply to let me know that I am at the extent of my travel time- in other words, leave the house by this time if you want to make it to work on time. Needless to say, I was ten minutes late. Therefore, I am updating at work, on a coworker's computer while he is outside killing his lungs.

I stayed up until three redesigning the layout of my website. Yes, in addition to this blog, I also have a site where I have podcasts and reviews of anime and popular movies. The new layout is coming along fine, save for the actual title of the page. I feel like it doesn't stand out as well as the logo does. There's no balance. Stupid Photoshop CS3! Why can't you read my mind?

Last night, I created a new character for The Goodenough Kids. He's a kindly old man I call The Tinkerer. He has a huge, bushy mustache, glasses, and coveralls. Everybody says he looks like a cross between Super Mario and Wilford Brimley. Who is the man. I'll post a picture of The Tinkerer when I scan it.

When finals are over I'm going to sleep for a decade.

Back to School

So, it's that time of year again. The writer in me is loving the extremely low price of college ruled looseleaf, but the beach bum in me is loathing the death of summer. Here in Idaho, the roads ice over for nearly four months in the dead of winter. I finally bought some snow tires for my truck, but it didn't make me feel any better.

I'm enrolled in college right now for an associates in Multimedia. I go to a year-round technical college that only takes one or two week breaks between quarters. Whenever I hear kids who attend traditional college whining about having to go back for their fall semester, I just shake my head with disgust.

"At least you get a summer vacation," I want to say, but let's face it. If they're whining about going back to school, they're probably the type of people that waste their summer breaks. In two weeks, I'm getting a one week break, and then I start my final quarter. Right after I graduate in January, I'll be driving home along a snowy road and die in a horrible accident. My only consolation is that I won't have to pay back my student loans.

I have no idea what to do over the break. I've already started storyboarding my final project for next quarter, so I could spend the entire break working on backgrounds or characters for the animation, but I'm a little burned out lately. Here's a picture of one of the characters I'm currently modelling.

After two and a half years on constant schooling, I feel both smarter and dumber. I don't feel completely tapped creatively, but I feel myself writing for a deadline more often than not lately. Perhaps this blog can help with that.

I wanted to start a blog that I could update every day. My plan was to wake up every morning, log on to Blogger, and blurb out whatever was on my mind upon waking. Whether or not I update it every day remains to be seen, but it's a hope, none-the-less.

Superhero as a Girlfriend

The following is in response to a random blog I found about a girl trying to figure out which superhero she preferred as a lover. I think she settled on Aquaman, because she liked seafood and Aquaman would have easy access to it. That, and he wouldn't have to come up for air too often. It inspired me to start up a blog of my own so I too could talk about senseless things, and hopefully brush up on my writing in the process.

Although I am a guy and a geek, I never really thought about a superhero lover until my friend Silver sat me down and forced me to watch Mallrats, which is easily Kevin Smith's best movie. When Brodie started talking about the breeding possibilities of Superman and Lois Lane, it sparked a discussion between us.

My friend Silver is female, and she chose Wolverine as her lover. "Other than the fact that he has metal claws, he's pretty much a normal guy, you know." Silver is a very practical girl.

Since I was a Jehovah's Witness as a child, comics were forbidden, so my list of superhero women was rather short.

The Invisible Girl from the Fantastic Four movie was right out, as she could turn invisible and spy on me. Call me crazy, but I don't like to fart in front of girls, let alone my invisible girlfriend. It's just... akward.

The girls from the X-Men movie were even less promising. One girl can read your dirty, lustful, wandering mind, one girl can kill you with a touch, and the other was played by Halle Berry. (Sorry, I'm not a fan of her attitude in the last X-Men movie. Her haircut was nice, though.)

Which brings me to Catwoman. I'll be horribly honest here. I liked her as the normal girl, but not as the cropped-hair superhero. It's not that I'm uncomfortable around dominant woman, but come on, cats are serious creatures. Catwoman as done by Halle Berry lost control, went on a fashion rampage, and was altogether a very bad cat.

I finally decided on waiting for Raven from the Teen Titans on Cartoon Network to turn 21. Silver assures me that all of the Titans are 18, but I'm no fool.

Why Raven? Aside from the fact that she can teleport us beers from the fridge when we're marathoning anime DVDs, she'll be on call a lot as a superhero, and that would probably work well with my erratic writing schedual. And she seems like a laid-back, low-profile superhero, despite the fact that she's currently gallivanting about in tights and a cape. Once she's out of Goth phase and is of legal drinking age, I'll totally give her my number.