Tonight Nefarious and I watched Jackie Chan’s The Spy Next Door while we ate supper and I assume she enjoyed it a lot because after the movie she spent a while running around doing spinning kicks at furniture and yelling about being a secret agent. Then I printed out a list of Toronto radio stations with her and while we were going through the stations I stopped at one and asked her if she “liked this Michael Jackson song”, thinking that she might know it from school or something… “Oh, I know him — like Percy Jackson and the Olympians, right?” Nonetheless, even after discovering that he was no son of Zeus, the station was still added to her favorites.
The girls that live here always bring me smiles.
I also got my new Cold Steel cane in the mail today. I really wanted to get a sword cane, but they’re illegal to carry in public in Canada (but legal other than that). This one just has a heavy duty fiberglass shaft, but I could still do some serious skull on skull damage. I also love my new shirt, which is, or at least appears to be many portraits of me. Gosh, I should not have looked up that link, every time I browse Threadless I end up adding a few bookmarks to my “wish list” folder.
Other than that I am pantless due to an embarrassing tear.
Edit: I forgot to mention it so let me add it while I remember. A few days ago while driving Nefarious to school, I saw a fox dash across the road in front of me with a squirrel in his mouth that he’d just caught. This was on a side street just north of High Park. I’ve seen quite a few foxes in that neighborhood, so I imagine that there’s a solid population of them in the park.
So my Maya 3D modeling and animation instructor is back after both illness and being unexpectedly trapped in Europe by the volcano, so I have some schoolwork waiting to be completed. However, that hasn’t stopped me from continuing to keep filling spare moments with 2D hand animation. This one, “Little Green Buddy” for lack of a real title, was actually just drawn over top of an inflatable toy boxing glove (basically a small beach ball) being tossed.
Edit: Caitlin just pointed out to me that you can see the blue/red glove in a couple of the frames (I didn’t bother editing it out, but it would be easy to do so in Photoshop), once falling behind her since in real life it didn’t chomp her on the head, and then later behind her on the ground.
It’s a lot of fun starting to build up a portfolio in animation, and learning new skills has been exhilarating. However, there are aspects of my condition/disease/whatever that make even the small (about a hundred frames) animation above a monumental struggle that’s frustrating in ways that I find very hard to confront. Thankfully at least the weather has been decent, but it’s starting to get quite hot, stepping solidly into summer after a strange and mostly nonexistent winter (with what, a total of less than five days with snow on the ground). Today we had the last of April’s showers, and hot rain came down on us in brief bursts that ignored the mugginess and refreshed us instead. This will soon become a stifling humid heat though so I’ve got to get on having the A/C in this place repaired (recharged) before we’re too far into that torture.
Speaking of repair, as you can see I finally got my Saab back after a month of a motley assortment of repairs, the leaky gas tank being the last to get checked off the list. I don’t think any of it was particularly difficult or time-consuming (especially given that the front clip of the car was removed, as was the tiny little engine — it really is hilariously miniature), but because forty year old limited-run cars from Sweden can take some time to get parts for… It took me a minute (and one embarrassing stall) to get used to the new and improved clutch — and wow, is this ever different from driving Caitlin’s car, probably as “opposite” as it could be — but it was a real pleasure to be behind the wheel again.
And now begins the other good part of my day, as I watch the Ultimate Fighter and eat pie. I got a small half price cherry pie, and I hope that the gluttony guilt of eating the whole thing is minimized by the “best before May 5″ sticker. That makes eating it all the law, right?
Other than Nefarious’s birthday party (the one with her school friends, not the family one that we had on her actual birthday), I’m not sure what else the weekend contains. Nefarious wants me to take her to see Furry Vengeance, a movie in which comical animals (as live-action “actors”) beat up on Brendan Frasier to stop a building development — she’s been dying to see it since seeing the trailer, but I think I’ll wait until a weekday. Going after school is actually much nicer because the theatre isn’t over-flowing. I think I’m more inclined to go eat ice cream at the park, maybe bring my Kindle along and read for a while.
Anyway, animation time. As always, this was made in the free/open-source/shareware simple 2D animation tool Pencil (also using this tool for video to image series, and this tool for image sequence to video conversions, both free again). Music is by Dick Dale and the Del-Tones (Those Memories of You, which adds a layer of unintended but not unappreciated sentimentality).
As you may remember, I have sort of a love/hate relationship with BoingBoing, that’s currently more on the “hate” end of the spectrum since they booted me off for saying negative things about the Muslim treatment of women in regards to the “beautiful cultural ritual” of forcing them to cover up. Anyway, there’s a funny conversation going on about Rob Cockerham’s Costco prank to see who’s got a bigger stick up their butt, the staff of BoingBoing or the forum commentors thereof. You may be surprised to hear that today it’s the commentors that seem to be winning.
Anyway, it’s been my observation that BoingBoing is far more guilty of disturbing Big Brother-esque editing and deleting comments in order to push their agenda, abusing their power (and the trust that the public still has for them, even if it declines daily) to manipulate perceived reality (which is ironic given their claimed plotics) — and that ignores the whole issue of “publicly shaming” those they disagree with by “disemvowelling” their posts — than the various organizations that they accuse of committing similar Internet Age sins. Holy glass houses! Anyway, as I pressed reload on this page to look at new comments, I was also watching comments appear and disappear as the moderators abused their power. This has happened too many times to mention, which is not just a sad comment on my Internet addiction, but also on Catholic-clergy-style falls from grace. Some day I really need to get around to writing a bot that monitors BoingBoing for this sort of thing and put together an animation of said abuse… it really would be quite a hilarious way of showing their betrayal of their readers.
Update: The entry ended up having its comment form removed, blocking further free conversation from happening, so in this case they decided to quash conversation completely.
