Final Project~!

I've been into the muppets since I was a kitten, and I've always wanted to do a puppet show. I had no idea what I wanted to do for my final project until about fifteen minutes before Todd went around asking.

I had prepared a much longer script for Filinia and Sock, but within the time constraints and me being horrendously sick, it was kind of impossible. It also had a lot of big words.

I wanted to touch on basic concepts like how different people react to fanart and fanfiction, because those topics have been at the center of a lot of controversy in my own life. I'm sort of in the middle with it. I obviously do copious amounts of fanart myself, but I don't usually go so far as doing porn, because it becomes an issue of intellectual property being messed with. But I also don't believe that the original author has enough control over the people who have chosen of their own free will to stop what they were doing with their "real" lives to read/watch/play their story to say, hey, "I don't think you should write fanfiction because it's immoral and those characters are MINE and not yours and it's MY world with MY ideas and MY whatever whatever whatever, etc." Trying to covet intellectual property like it's physical seems really futile, because once your works are published enough to be popular, such as Transformers or Harry Potter or Inu Yasha belong to the ages. That, in my opinion, is worth a lot more than trying to kill your own fandom, who propogate your ideas. The idea that it's people pushing it around, like with Cory Arcangel's personal websites being broken, is stronger than the author. I guess that scares a lot of authors, because it's only human to feel attachment with something you've created.

On the other hand, a fandom left completely unchecked, a la Harry Potter, can get massively scary when you're in it. There's always peer pressure, getting your outlook colored by a friend's opinion about something that's going to happen, or how another person feels about a certain character, or the mass of very very scary erotica that the fans still turn out.

I didn't have time to spark an interactive debate, but I think that would have been cool, too.

I wanted to do a lot more topics with these puppets. There are so many to cover. I've been on the sidelines of a lot of internet drama myself. It's really scary and interesting what people will do when they let go of physicality and just interact with other consciousnesses without the normal insecurities people have face to face.

Oh yeah, I should post the video, shouldn't I? XD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhUCjAtPQ1Y

Also, THANK YOU SO MUCH, KIM!!!!!!

Night, guys!

Flash Things~

Heyo - I made a loop in class that really ended up only being 2 seconds long. It looks better jsut by itself. I don't know how to embed it directly as Flash directly onto the blog, tho. Here's the link instead.

Here also is something I cooked up by myself, for myself. The U-TIC Danceparty! (It's actually hastily done fanart of some characters from Xenosaga, which is my knock-down, drag-out, most favorite video game ever.) These guys can sync up to just about every song on my computer, and probably yours, too.

HI.

Nahid Toontoochi Lecture

This was more or less my first exposure to actual graphic design from Iran. I'd been helping other students in the lab with the posters Ken's class was making for this lecture, so what I was looking at was American interpretations of what they thought Iranian graphic design looked like. Sort of like American Chinese food. I wasn't expecting to be so impressed, but I was, because I've always been really enamored with cultures that I have absolutely no biological roots to.

I was extremely excited about a lot of the pieces that Ms. Toontoochi showed because I actually took a Typography course with Ken a few semesters ago, and it made me obsessed with letterform. The things that these artists were able to do with the Persian Alphabet were really just sweeping and beautiful, and around about impossible to accomplish with ours.

Not that there's anything wrong with the Roman Alphabet. I just haven't seen a lot of Old English calligraphic forms in magazine advertisements lately.

I guess one of the reasons I seem to be so drawn to foreign imagery is because status quo USA rejects their traditional roots. Actually, the U.S. technically has no traditional roots because caucasian american culture is made up of people who decided to leave Europe for some reason or other. And in general, the average american doesn't really have any particular interest in their heritage other than "Oh hey, I'm Irish! Let's drink!" and football. Not that there's anything wrong with drinking and football, but it just seems much less interesting to me than say, the Renaissance Festival or the latest manga that's come out. Then again, I also consider myself a squirrelly escapist hippie artist kid, too.

DED

Hey guys - sorry I missed class yesterday. I was really, really sick. Too sick to blog, but not too sick to text message Heather to let Todd know that I wouldn't be coming. Also not too sick to sit up in my room playing my Nintendo Gameboy DS until the battery ran down.

I took a look at some of you guys's videos! WE KICKED THOSE OTHER GUYS'S ASSES! (I still have to work on mine. v_V I kinda have no excuse.)

I don't suppose I've wailed at anyone in class about the utter hell I've been experiencing at the hands of my transfer to the Wawa off of Route 40. I snapped and quit the place this past Sunday. They're probably not too pleased with me at the moment. Which is fine and dandy with me because of all the breakdowns I'd suffered at their hands in the course of two weeks. I probably wouldn't have been too much help in the first place because I am actually really very very sick and probably would have been moreso had I stayed there.

So, hopefully I'll have something up sunday. D: Sorry for missing what sounded like an awesome class!!

Cell Phones = NO

Much like Donny, I also consider myself a big tech-head, but I'm not a big fan of cell phones. Mostly because, from the start, I've lived in a place that's a complete dead zone, so I've never been interested in having anything more than the cheapest phone possible.

When I got my first cell phone, I was 22 years old (I'm 25 now). It had a camera on it, but I had no idea how to get the pictures off of it. All I knew was that I had to subscribe to some sort of web service that wasn't included in my normal cell phone bill, and that the attendant at Cingular was not willing to take the time to show me how to work it even if I did get it.

So, after about a year, I dumped Cingular and went with T-Mobile because I had some friends who worked at T-Mobile in the hopes that they would show me how to do some things. The second I get my new phone, "Here ya go! You can do it! I believe in you! :D"

...

...

...

"ANDY, HOW DO I GET IT TO TEXT MESSAGE THINGS THAT ARE THE LETTERS I'M ACTUALLY TRYING TO TYPE IN INSTEAD OF IT BEING DEFAULT SET ON TRYING TO SPELL THINGS FOR ME?"

Srsly, it's all about selling things and not about educating people how to use them. That's why a lot of people don't like technology. It's because it's being sold and not adopted to people. We're not taught how to treat a piece of technology. It's either sink or swim, and oh yeah, if you're lucky, here's an instruction manual in 10 languages that goes over the first 10% of what you might run into.

Don't even get me started on the prices of cell phone services.

Most days, I'm just as happy to call someone with full reception from a land line.

Movie + Digital Element - Live Action Death Note Movie

Death Note (Live Action)
(2006)

Oh great, I bet you were all expecting me to pick something anime based, weren't you? Nonetheless, something currently very POPULAR and anime based. I even consider this choice to be rather stereotypical, but I ask you, dear readers, to hear me out for a second.

I happened upon this film while chatting it up with Kurt in the lab back in May. I'd never seen the anime or read the manga before seeing it, so I was watching this purely as a film and not as a Death Note fan, so I thoroughly enjoyed it (though now after seeing like 25 episodes of the anime, I probably would go back and start picking it apart, but I've loaned it back to Kurt, so I'll do that later when I get my own, non-illegal, badly transrated copy of it).

Death Note, in a nutshell, is about Light Yagami, a cop's son who turns into an impromptu vigilante executioner after attaining a notebook (mistakenly dropped into the human world by the death god Ryuk) that allows the user to kill anyone they want just by writing down their name. It's set in regular old Japan and sort of tastes like Boondock Saints...without the irish-ness. The thing about the Live Action Death Note movie's CG element that sets it apart from other movies I've seen is the way Ryuk is presented.


I'm fairly sure we've all seen Lord of the Rings by now. Or Star Wars: Episode I. Or at least Harry Potter. Or The Matrix (and even though I love the Matrix), all of those films exhibit very dramatically presented digital characters that always fall short of being believable due to this rubbery quality that comes out of trying to make them perfect. Sure, you can see the shinies in Dobby's eyes, but he has no weight to him, and he's made out of the same floppy digital latex that Neo has fighting the gaggle of Agent Smiths in The Matrix: Reloaded. A lot of people seem to be always putting SO much effort into making things SO perfect because it costs SO much to do these things, but a lot of the time, it just ends up looking incredibly overworked.



The thing that sets Ryuk apart from Gollum is the fact that he's not polished to a shine. They don't have to go to great lengths to PROVE that he can interact with his environment, because we already know that it's just Japan, and Ryuk's just a death god following this kid around. There are no big dramatic scenes dedicated to showing off how much work they put into every feather in his collar, and whenever Ryuk does interact with his environment, he has a weight to him instead of just the wet flappiness that seems to prevail with a lot of other CGI movie characters. He's understated, we're not forced to like him, and just not in the spotlight at all, which I think makes this presentation very tasteful.


Now, unless I manage to smuggle something in from Korea, your best chance of seeing this movie is looking it up on YouTube, and it probably won't be very good quality, but I srsly recommend it.

Speaking of Art Music

Heyo - since I missed the beginning of class the last time Todd was here, I forgot to ask if anyone had mentioned Bjork during the art music lecture. Because, really, Bjork can make English sound like a foreign language. As far as art goes, she really goes completely out with any theme she tries. You can laugh at the swan dress or the way she makes things sound like she's saying HAAAAAAM very gutterally, but I really do think that she's an artist at heart. She's frequently appearing in ads and articles in Vogue Magazine (which if you hadn't noticed in my show, a lot of the collages were Vogue collages. I became obsessed with Vogue ads in 2003 and amassed a huge collection of them until they all started to be repeats).

Um...so, like, I have...dialup...at home right now, and since I'm posting this from home, I can't really serve up any clips of Bjork, but once and/or if I get time in the lab tomorrow, I'll try to put some up.

Here's Mike-and-Ian-Shiva.
In class, I had cut out the florescent light and the grey wall to make it more ethereal-looking, but since it's a work in progress, I'd figure I'd put it up as a behind-the-scenes thing.

When the Cylons come to take our candles...

...what will you do, and where will you be?
(original link here)

Mac bodhisattva? Probably not, but it was a cute picture. I still need to flip my thumbs around. XD

This is one of my old animation experiments.
It's supposed to animate in time to this song.

Hey guys, check out my art opening on the 27th!
...well, looks like yer all coming on the 25th anyway...
XD