DUNED OUT.

Ohey, I drew something!
A bit too manly to be Kyle MacLachlin, but the eyes and the obvious Dune catch phrases give it away. I'm not sure if I like this. It looks so commercial. Always gotta start somewhere, tho!

I just rediscovered this blog.
I've been looking at a bunch of other art blogs and I really like the blogspot format for stuff. I'd feel rude on LJ if I posted pictures directly on there. I wonder if anyone's still watching me from class...

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!!