Progress makes...progress

Sorry, still no audio

Pretty close to final on a couple of shots here. The house will have lots more going on when Bokser get's done with some sim. We also need to break up the fence a bit more and add a few more things. Bokser made some pretty cool tools to help animate the house and move pivots during animation

Been busy on a wide variety of things from this sequence above to riding lawn mower research to still combating this poison ivy/oak of 4 weeks now.

Warning! 
Fixin to talk about God and faith here so if you wanna keep to the art skip the following....

Reading a lot as well. Rereading some of the emergent thinkers lately and listening to some of their podcasts. Specifically rereading "A Generous Orthodoxy" at present and don't find it very generous in it's characterizations of some sides. "Strawman" arguments get a little old. Attended a church that leaned that way for about a year. There are many good things I saw there and in the "movement" but I can't quite seem to fully make the jump philosophically. Still not sure how I feel about some of the ideas and what not. Actually that's a part of the problem with post modern theology - it's often hard to get to point of what some of the people are saying in the midst of the the perpetual "Yes and"'s. What that means is they'll set up a yes/no question and then proceed not to answer it. On many questions of the faith (protestant Christianity) I'm in the solid "I don't know" camp which is a long long way from where I once was in high school when of course I knew everything (if my thenself met my nowself and chatted about belief I might well call myself a heretic).

One of my main issues is that it feels like much of the emergent movement seems to be wrapped up in politics and I'm just not a fan of that on either side of the aisle. In as much as the "religous right" has swung to the ride side of the fences, the emergent branch seems to swing just as hard to the left. Frankly, if a preacher starts telling me who to vote for it's time to find the exit. Had some good conversations with some atheist/agnostic buddies when I was in LA and frankly I sympathize with a lot of what they had to say about their experiences with people of faith.

I pray I'm never one of "those experiences."

"Get over here!"

No I had nothing to do with this screenshot. Yes, I'd like to be Batman.

Scorpion kept using his signature move to keep me in the brutal crucible that was the Mortal Kombat production pipeline. Weeks of very long hours and plenty of weekends work makes for crispy cogs in the game-making machine. However, it is done (at least my portion) and though I learned lots of good lessons during production I can't really talk about them yet, so.... Thankfully, I'm off on a little comp time and I plan on enjoying it and pursuing normalcy again. That begins with:

• Fitness - It's amazing how fast this remarkable thing we call the human body can go from being in shape to "yea-I-know-we-ran-4-miles-no-sweat-two-months-ago-but-I-don't-wanna-do-that-anymore". It gets worse the older you get. Yay. However, like the apostle Paul declared I shall "beat my body and make it my own" once more.
• Back to the basics - The joy of just animating faces has run it's course and I need some more exercise for those animation muscles. I'm working on my first shot for Bokser's Garden City (all done with layout!)
• Politics - This election cycle and the insipid stupidity of this whole two-faced financial crisis blame game has burned me out. The press for the most part has not been doing it's job and I'd rather animate or read a book than try to do their jobs for them. The debate last night was just painful. I've cleared out my Google reader of political readings - Animation, friends, tech and some theology is good enough for now.
• Christmas Card - I gotta get started on it. Asap. :)

Oh a very, VERY cool little tool that Bokser came across is a service called Dropbox. We're using it to keep assets up to date on Garden City and I'm using it to send files between my PC and mac easy peasy. Watch the little video. It's free and very cool.

New things, new days...

• New(ish) job - Monday was my first day in Midway Austin. Things are going well and most importantly, my one way commute has gone from 38 miles to a fraction of that - 3.8miles. My small part toward driving less and stopping the world from blowing up because of mankind (see Al Gore's film for more information on that).
• Apartment living - Finding an apartment in a new place can be an absolute nightmare especially if you've never been to a town and have a day and a half in which to find one. I used a service called apartmentsnow.com which cost me nothing and I was very happy with. However, my new landlords are not starting off with a very good record. First of all, when I was looking here and they showed me the model, it looked great - nice new appliances, great color and great layout. What I didn't know and I discovered my first night here was that there is a rail line running directly behind the complex (far from the rental office or model I saw). My apartment just so happens to be about the closest in the whole complex to said railroad. Imagine my delight when trying to sleep. I reckon I'll get used to it. Sure will help me find a new place with my 6 month lease is up. Secondly, I got in a week ago Monday, dropped off the stuff from my car and went to the grocery store and got some milk and some Frosted Mini Wheats. My stuff wasn't to come until this past Saturday so on Tuesday I headed to Houston to hang out with my girlfriend. When I got back on Saturday and was waiting for the movers, I noticed some ants on the counter. I made a note of it and went down the rental office to request them have someone come out. I only thought it was a few ants and didn't think much of it. Further investigation found that the ants had quite a little conga line going. Right to my Frosted Mini Wheats. Flustered, I started calling the rental office as obviously the apartment had not been treated before I moved in. Wow. I have to hand it to them - they know how to give bad service. The first time I called and said that it needed to be dealt with that day as I couldn't unpack or buy any food till that ant problem was fixed. They said there was nothing at all they could do as the pest people only came on Friday. I explained that they could call their manager and said I expected to be called back with an answer in the next couple of hours. Nothing. I tried calling and I heard the line pick up, background chatter and noise, and then be hung up on. Confused, I tried again, same reaction (with new background noise). Now I've never really had any company I'm paying for service do that, so I was three parts surprised and one part irritated. Finally the phone went to an answering service which I left a message with them and was called back a little later. The girl said the same thing. My response was that either they were going to send someone out or I was going to buy the stuff to do it myself. Guess who won that one, eh? A trip to Lowes later, my ants are gone. I will say this - I didn't know they had it, but if you Google an apartment complex, you can see comments from tenants. If only I had known. Ah well, builds character, right?
• Josh the Car Body Banger! - In other news, I fixed my bumper. When I was in Houston last week, I grabbed a rubber mallet from my girlfriend's tool box and banged that puppy right out. Doesn't look too shabby, either. Well, actually, that's exactly what it looks like....:)

Tax time

Trying to follow Jesus' advice...Matthew 17:27

I did the annual limbo with the 1040's, w2s, 1099MISC's and itemization of deductible expenses this weekend. Tax time is a good annual test of integrity. I imagine that cheating on taxes is a fairly common practice. I know for a fact that, even wanting to be honest, it can be nigh to impossible to know beyond a shadow of doubt that you've done everything correctly when, as a call to the IRS last year illustrated, even the IRS doesn't necessarily certify their own advice. I think the government does an abysmal job for the most part making good use of our tax dollars. When businesses can be held accountable to their stock holders for being negligent in properly running a company, why is it the citizens of a nation get so little traction in holding their their leaders to account? Throwing money at every issue that raises it's head doesn't necessarily ring with the sound of wisdom - there are such things in life as money pits. I really don't wanna go on a political rant at present, so I'll stop while I'm ahead. Even believing the government grossly incompetent in much of it's spending expenditures, much less being honest what the actual ledger is, I'll do my part, pay my 15-20% (whatever it ends up being) and keep looking for people I can actually vote for. After all taxes do a lot. In the words of the great Ned Flanders of Simpson's renown:

Taxes pay for everything! Policemen, trees, sunshine. And let's not forget the folks who just don't feel like workin', God bless 'em!

It could always be worse...:)

With news like this...

So I ran across this little gem of an article today. Thankfully, this one isn't about politics. Looks like neither side is telling the truth. If I ran my finances like this, I'd be in bankruptcy court or collections...who exactly runs collections on the Feds? Makes it understandable why lots'a folk wanna just have a beer and sit in front of the tube and pretend everything is just dandy.

I'm a liar...and other stuff

A few weeks ago I wrote that there was gonna be an article in 3d World on The Potter. January's issue has come and gone and I actually was mailed a copy of February's issue which I thought would contain it. Alas it did not. I say I'm a liar because I made a statement based on bad "intelligence" that I believed to be true that turned out to be wrong. The story may turn up in time but for now but, according to the politics of the day, I am a liar. So for making statements I believed to be true, I must and shall be villified. Any takers? Enough satire. Edit 02/06 - A buddy emailed me this morning and informed me that the the article is in the March issue...sweet vindication:) Things are going along fine. I've been coming home and putting in 4-6 hours a night into this freelance gig I've been truckin on. I'm getting close to being done with blocking for the whole thing so I expect to really start moving this weekend. I took a break last night and did a little test render for the client of the set and modeled some flourishes as well and did another pass of polish on surfacing. Getting close on a final set. I received copies of the new Houdini book that used a Potter image over the weekend. The publisher was kind enough to send copies for the whole team so I gotta make a run to UPS. Some buddies got me to try site called linkedin.com last week. It seems pretty sweet for maintaining connections and broadening your industry connections. Give it a whirl.