Jenny Lewis

I love, l. o. v. e., love, Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twins. Rabbit Fur Coat is an albumn with few peers. If you have not listened to it, through, beginning to end, at least 20 times, you need to. Goodnight folks!

A History of Non-Violence

So, I have started watching the webcasts for the Introduction to Nonviolence class at UC Berkeley. The first one is pretty cool, a quick overview of what is going to be talked about. More specifically he talks about the idea behind the non-violence theories, with a model for situation which involves positive and negative energy, and how they apply to a real-world situation.

His basic outline is that you have negative energy situations and positive energy situations and that you can introduce negative or positive energy to those situations and they will change to the corresponding energy that you introduce. So, if you are in a negative situation, the real way to deal with it is not to approach it with a negative energy response but a positive energy response.

I'm not sure what I think about all this, I suppose I will reserve judgment until I get further into the course but my initial reaction is that it all sounds well and good but is not too practical. However, thankfully, I believe that this will be dispelled by the class as I think that's it's purpose, to show that non-violence is in fact practical, with Ghandi being the prime example used.

I think that I will try and pick up the required texts for the class, there are only two and I doubt that they would be too much, especially if I found them second-hand. I don't know how I will find the time to do this all but, I suppose I can try. I waste a lot of time on random crap and while it's all and good this might be a nice thing to do instead of something random, we'll see. If anyone is reading this and wants to go through this with me you are more than free to mirror post on your own blog. ;-) Or, if you prefer, in the comments section of each post things could be discussed. Just a thought.

Primitive Theatre

Here it is, as turned into my instructor.

CA!

When I close my eyes, which I won't be able to do for another hour or so, I see tangent handles and animation curves. This animation, I was excited about, but now, I've run out of time to work on it and I'd really like to start over from scratch. I can already see so many mistakes that I've made, parts that I could make better, cleaner, more readable. And we aren't working on animation for the rest of the semester in my CA class. Though I still have TA to fall back on. Sigh, I don't want to end this project but, alas, I have to. Though! we can resubmit! Though I probably won't have time to do so. I should though, I think I'd learn allot from doing it over.

Work In Progress

This is what I've been burning the midnight oil for. It's due friday so I should have a fully rendered version then.

Yoshitaka Amano!

Today, in the month of October on Friday the 13th, if the year 2000 and 6, Yoshitaka Amano visited Ringling, It was so cool. I and a group of other students were able to eat lunch with him and ask him questions. Then we went to a lecture hall where the rest of the students were and he gave a demonstration, drawing four pieces in ink right there in front of us, I have video. I also have pictures of me and a group of other people with Amano but they are on a friends camera, I will add them later. Till then, feast on videos of said demonstration. So awesome, you don't even know.

P.S. I am sorry for the low quality shaky footage, it was so much cooler in person :-(

Amano Painting a moogle


Amano Painting a villian from Final Fantasy - Amazing


Amano Painting Sephiroth, partial
coming soon

Amano Paints Vampire Hunter D

More Lions

I was exploring different styles, the first one is supposed to be very graphic and is from photo reference and the second I think is kinda Dr. Seuss-y/Chuck Jones, but I'm probably being delusional in that.

Lion!

Heesa lion! With a chicken on his head.

Sarasota Water, Blech

I just received this e-mail,

" We have just been informed that the City of Sarasota has shut off the water to a number of on-campus locations and plans to have it off for at least two hours today. It is essential that you BOIL WATER you plan to use for drinking or preparing food FOR THE NEXT 72 HOURS."

This, after having the same thing happen all of last weekend! What is wrong with these people, Florida has the worst water that I have ever had, in my life! It's so frustrating not being able to just drink water out of the faucet. I have to buy it somewhere, or get a filter, and that's just ordinary Florida water. Now the city decides that they are going to take it to the next level and make us boil our water, next thing we know we'll have to take it by bucket out of the bayou! So annoying.

Craziness!

So, North Korea appears to have tested a nuclear bomb. What will be the effects of this? What will the UN's response be, what will China's stance be? Will Japan change they're pacifist Constitution? Is the United States at risk? Will they sell nuclear weapons to terrorists? How will George Bush be prevented from screwing things up? This is huge, only time will tell what the full ramifications of this are.

Bucky Whickshire

A new Bucky Whickshire for the new American Youth! Copyright, me! Don't steal my stuff.

The most random website, ever

'Learn how to make Mayan Hot Chocolate, like in the movie Chocolat, or make a vase filled with fish.' all at andreas.com

Bay Area

I really like this webcam, they have a timelapses of the previous day, everyday, so you can see an entire day in the space of a couple minutes. Oh, remember as you watch that timelapse, which I know you are, that it isn't the sun going around the Earth, but the earth rotating on it's axis, freaky! Oh, also, the rays that come through the fog near the end are called Crepuscular rays, aka sun rays, aka God rays.

Two Drawings

So, I'm annoyed and depressed by my own blog and so I am now posting a couple drawings from my sketchbook to lighten the mood.

Rich People

Sofia Coppola is rich, beyond rich, and always has been. The same is true for Bill Gates. People act like he is some great entrepreneur, an example of the American Dream, he isn't. He was born to rich, successful parents who were themselves born to rich successful parents. He is smart, he is quick, he is ruthless, he has always had enough money to gamble on the big bets and he hit the jackpot.

But back to Sofia Coppola. Here, in an article in the New York Times, she talks with the interviewer about Paris, how her parents have a place up a rode they pass by. Even though they are Italian, she says, they would often go to Paris, though Francis Ford Coppola was born in Detroit and raised in New York so I don't see how her family being Italian brings any significance to them visiting Paris often, it's not as though they lived in Italy and traveling to Paris would be any more significant than any other place. But, that aside, she loves Paris, she has deep emotional connections, I can understand this, I think we all have deep connections with various places for various reasons, as the preceding post shows I have a strong emotional connection to the place her Dad currently lives.

But the point of me talking about this is Lost in Translation, the only film she's made that I've seen. Renowned for it's capturing of the feeling of Tokyo through the eyes of an American foreigner. I marveled at the movie, it's subdued tone, it's lack of explanation of every story point, it's creation of a feeling of place I had never met. I wonder how hard it was for her to create that movie, after reading that article, the movie seems a natural output based on her life and it's subtlety the product of someone who has no need to bow to corporate movie executives and multiple managerial script re-writes.

Oh, did you know that Nicolas Cage is Sofia's brother? I didn't, I also didn't know that he went to high school with Al Brooks, Angelina Jolie, Lenny Kravitz and Rob Riener.

I'm sure this all sounds very bitter and maybe it is. But I think it has more to do with the realization that it is very hard to be anything approaching as rich as Bill Gates without having more or less been born into it. More and more it seems to me strikingly obvious that hard work alone will almost never make you large amounts of money. I don't have any value judgments to pass on that, at least at the moment. No, I'm simply beginning to really realize the way that things work I suppose.

However I would like to pass judgment on one particular aspect of the rich in American that is fairly easy to throw stones at, particularly because Warren Buffet the second richest person in the world has said it before me. That is that corporate managers and CEOs are making far too much, for instance he takes in as his salary $100,000 which to any normal person would seem immense but compared to the average of $9 million that other executives that occupy the S&p 500 take in it is absurdly small.

I'm rambling but I want to through out a couple more statistics that are depressing to me :-D
The top 1% own nearly twice as much corporate wealth as they did 15 years ago.
"In 38 states where the incomes of the bottom fifth of families grew more slowly than those at the top, incomes at the top rose by an average of $45,800 (62%), while the incomes of the poorest grew by $3,000 (21%)." This info is from here.

This will probably bore you

You know what I really love about the Bay Area? No? Well, I'll tell you.

It's not that it's stunningly beautiful, has many hiking and outdoor activities available or is situated in the heart of California.

It's really two things.
One, it feels like home, it feels like a place I can really sink my teeth into. My mom and dad are both from the bay area, more or less, and I feel like it's where my family is from. Our roots are there, it's sensibilities are our family's sensibilities, it's home.

Two, there is a feeling of space and ability for me to feel that space in a way that I have pretty much nowhere else. I can look around and know where I am, I know what's around me and I can feel it around me. When I drive through California, through the central valley, across the Alatamont pass, through Oakland, up to Lafayette, over to Sausalito and across the GG bridge, I can feel where each place is and I can feel where I am, I know the place and I know where I am.

I know that this is very ephemeral, but it's true, I know and love the way that the Bay Area makes me feel, I love it's wind, I love the way the air feels, fresh as it flows over me; it's bright, new and interesting. Of course, if anyone reads this and then goes there, or lives there, they will probably say I'm nuts, that it doesn't feel like that, I'm being overly dramatic. Well, maybe I am using language that seems overly dramatic but only because I am trying to convey the way the place makes me feel. Feel it for yourself and try to describe it, see how it compares.

This blog is getting weird.

?

Why are my pictures disapeared? Where be they? Why did they leave me?

"That's George Washington, the first president, of course. The interesting thing about him is that I read three—three or four books about him last year. Isn't that interesting?"—Showing German newspaper reporter Kai Diekmann the Oval Office, Washington, D.C., May 5, 2006

"As you can possibly see, I have an injury myself—not here at the hospital, but in combat with a cedar. I eventually won. The cedar gave me a little scratch."—After visiting with wounded veterans from the Amputee Care Center of Brooke Army Medical Center, San Antonio, Texas, Jan. 1, 2006

"You know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror." --George W. Bush, interview with CBS News' Katie Couric, Sept. 6, 2006

Long article with a trove of "bushisms."

Trying to corner some ideas

I think that it's possible to corner in an idea, or space. By this I mean that I think it's possible to take a subject, let's say animation, and create an image of the different ways that people look at that subject. I say I think because often it is very hard, at least for me, to do this, it takes a lot of research and thought.

So why am I saying this? I think it's because I want to believe that things are understandable, that it is possible to paint a picture that makes it so that you understand a space. I think it's also possible that we simply don't have the intellect or ability to fully understand the complex workings of the universe. I see myself struggling with concepts, I use visual models for understanding things...I will now indulge in a little bit self-indulgence, I am going to talk about myself in a positive manner, which can sometimes be sickening so brace yourself.

I believe that I understand concepts quite fully, I don't have surface knowledge of most concepts, if I know it, I know it, if I don't, I don't talk about it. I think, based nothing but anecdotal evidence that it is because I create visual models for pretty much anything that I learn. Math, science, art, whatever it is, I have an image of what it is I'm trying to understand. Anyways, I think this is a main way that people understand concepts and information, through the use of models, usually based on some sort of mental image.

So, where was I, oh yes, based on this fact that I tend to use visual models for understanding things my way of thinking is inherently flawed. We as humans only see things in particular ways and so if a concept too elusive to fit into our way of thinking then I find it very hard to understand.

Then, to the point, I think it is very possible that even simple concepts and ideas cannot be fully explored by us, or me in particular, because we do not have the facilities to truly understand said concepts. I know that I can feel when I run up against my mental boundaries, as I'm sure many people have. I think that we are very inventive with getting around these limitations, but how much more effective would be if we didn't have these limitations? And, I think even more importantly, what are we going to do when run into problems that are too hard for us?

He's Right!

I have a been a big believer in Google and Google's indexing of the world's libraries, but this guy is right! The universities and libraries of the world should be the ones digitizing and making available to the public through an open source way their vast collection of books, Google can then index that. But one company shouldn't be controlling it! This vast digital library should be freely available to all companies, institutions and and individuals equally.

However, I should say that Google is not the one at fault here, in fact I think they are very much in the right, instead it is the universities and libraries of the world that are at fault, why haven't they modernized fully? Why is that to have access to a truly good library I have to live in a large city like New York or something like that? Just because I live in the other 99% of the United States somehow means that I shouldn't have access to the huge sum of human knowledge contained in books? I say no and I think, on principle, the larger Universities do as well. Look at Berkeley, they are putting whole semesters worth of classes online, available for anyone to view, that's what they, and all other large libraries, should be doing with their libraries.

To ramble on a bit more about this too, I think that it's not all the Library's fault either, really. They have to deal with the problems of copyright law in today's environment, which is more and more hostile towards free flow of information. Don't get me wrong, I'm a strong proponent of copyright law but really, what's the difference between me happening to live in, say, Chicago, and having access to a huge library of books and being able to access those same books online, but now I can do it in the middle of Oklahoma. Obviously the first hurdle is copyright law but there also is the hurdle of costs. Libraries have no incentive to put books online when their costs are paid for by local taxes, they actually have a disincentive.

So, here I propose a compromise, as I stand on my soap box yelling at a wall, the Libraries of the United States at least, should 1. Digitize all their books. 2. This digitization should be a federally funded project. 3. If the costs rise too high, which I seriously doubt would happen, then a small fee should be charged users of said library.

Google vs. Microsoft: Do you want Google to be your ‘librarian’?</a> by ZDNet's Donna Bogatin -- "Even before we started Google, we dreamed of making the incredible breadth of information that librarians so lovingly organize searchable online," said Larry Page, Google co-founder and president of Products, in announcing Google’s aim to digitally scan libraries’ book holdings two years ago. In "Google Library’ to world: give us ‘all books in all languages,’ free of charge,” [...]

Why this exists

I made this blog because I am hoping that it will help with my career as well as personally however I am questioning whether I should have made this. I see other people 's blogs and truthfully that's a main way that I am learning about different people and styles so I thought that maybe I should do the same, then people would see my stuff and who knows.

It seems to me that the people who are constantly putting themselves on the line, putting their stuff out there are the people who find success and so this is why I have made this blog... I wonder if I should tell anyone about this blog... should I change the billing to my experiences at Ringling? This would build a readership for sure, especially if I sent a link back to the teachers at LCC and friends and family.

But then I'd have to start censoring myself, I'd not write about personal things, I would try to paint myself in a positive light. And yet, realistically, that's what I need to do to create good publicity for myself. I think that I have changed my modus opernendi, if that's the right spelling, this blog is killed, I'm gonna move it to google notebook and start up a new blog centered on my efforts to get a job and get through schooling at Ringling.

Devil Concept

So this is a page from sketchbook where I am working out ideas for demons, devils, imps, whatever. I was trying to come up with a devilish creature that would run around and screw things up.

Pros: Some interesting ideas produced, never went with the storyline that required them so these never got used, though in the future they may.

Cons: Not really all that original, or that intersting. Designs are rather bland, not much character. The devils don't seem to have their own life or vitality/personality which is a huge problem.

Corporate Practices

Alright. Pros, I think it's a nice, clean, little drawing that is pretty funny and visually interesting.

Cons, It needs to be touched and inked, the hands are obviously off, the arms don't have as much structure as I'd like and the right guy's head is....weird.

I don't like critiquing my stuff online, I mean, I know that I chose to do this and no-one will ever see this most likely but still, if someone were to stumble across this site and see the drawings and think they were okay but then read my critiques they would be like, "Yeah, he's right, these do suck, I'm not coming back to this losers site!"

So that's that.

Annoyances

I like this image, I think it's gets across the message I was trying to achieve. True the draftsmanship is not perfect but it is a sketch...

I suppose I am of two minds of this and I seem to be facing this problem. To me, this image works, it has the feel I want and I don't want to waste my time cleaning it up etc.

On the other hand, I know that I would probably not really look at this if I was a casual viewer, it's not finished, it's rough and takes work to see what's going on. But I'm lazy and I don't want to work on it anymore, because that's all it will be, work, it won't be enjoyable like the initial sketch was, thus my dilemma.

The begining.

Post 1.

I like it because it's a half decent drawing, by my abilities at least.

I dislike it because the lines don't serve the image, they are too sketchy. The face should be better defined, the arm is stock, the chair is 2d looking and I really suck at hair.