This is about an ice citadel, and the desert, and the stillwalker, and a bird. Always a bird. Includes sketches of plans, movements, ideas, dreams.
This showcases my flavor, style, aesthetic, and creativity with excerpts of 2-dimensional Flash animations from the last two years.
This mode works well for me. Color! Glorious color! But line! Mm, beautiful, delicious line. I love line. Line, let's not fight anymore. That's right, be close to me.
There's not a day when you wake up and feel ready to make your first storyboard; there's just the day when you make your first storyboard.
White collar crime really doesn't get captured often enough on cellular video. 'Hey, what've you been up to?' 'Oh, just putting the finishing touches on that second set of cooked books.' 'Ha ha hey that's a great outfit, mind if I take a picture? Hey get that book cover in the picture too, it looks really good against your shirt...'
Sometimes on runs, it's good to fend off Runner's Despair with a big "kyup!" like one might say to urge a horse along, or when about to deliver a warrior's blow (to a snake-lady or other).
Not everyone believes in luck. It's unclear how to reconcile the obvious advantages of one's birth (talent, family, geopolitical peace or disquiet in the place one was born) with (an American?) belief in self-sufficiency and bootstraps and a (perhaps Calvinist?) perspective that achievement indicates that one is of the elect, although 'elect' determined in this case not by the warm light of G-d's favor, but by perseverance, will, and hard work. But isn't possessing these qualities, whether inborn or by cultivation, also a quirk of one's disposition and personality type?
Victor sent a link to a radio programme the other week, you may appreciate Nelson George's admiration for Michael Jackson's "ass power", id est logging the hours (upon hours upon hours) in the studio, pushing out material, doing the work. Malcolm Gladwell says that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in something. It's a refreshing perspective: you, you personally, could become an expert in (literally) anything, provided you were willing to put in the hours, a factor that exists outside of talent or disposition, outside of "luck".
So then the natural question: what is it that you want to be an expert in?
If we've hung out a bit, chances are you said something that sent me running for pen and paper, to write it down immediately. Take note of that time, the kind of thing you said, that particular strange or inspired or goofy feeling you felt when you said it. Ok and so the next you feel that, please WRITE DOWN what you said. Because I can't be around all the time to be capturing the gold that you drop and let fall away so decadently, so recklessly. M'kay?
Brother Mustapha's take on pasta.
This image is a reference to the animated card suits in the Sierra edition of "Hoyle's Official Book of Games" for PC, as remembered from youth. Did you play?
On the radio right now, a guy who's kindof stressed out refers to Californians as 'magical thinkers' existing in a fairy land of fiscal budgetmancy. It makes him feel tired and uptight.
I'm feeling good, though! Here are some notes and drawings from my travels over the last many weeks.
What, you think I don't know?
As a fellow traveler to law students everywhere: if you ever want a pal to study first-year Contracts with, I am so there.
This was from an inspired plane ride to Chicago. And also the truth.
People are incredible, and say incredible things. One loses credibility with myself in quoting them, which is why I try and write things down as quickly as possible.
'Did I say that? I don't remember saying that. If I did say that, I completely agree with myself.'
Another dragon.
I have a ten years/$10 bet still out, made with Swan about three years ago. Still got seven years! It's not about the $10; it's about the feeling of peace that will come with knowing I can trust my intuitions so precisely and deeply, over such a timelag. Having strong intuition, ability to interpret data about your world and make incredibly accurate predictions, or deep insight, is a superpower that you can have in real life and who doesn't want to cultivate superheroism?
Birds are fun to draw.
"It's kindof weird though, right?" "No, not weird. Brilliant."
Further adventures in mishearing.
"The world is supposed to end in 2012, according to the Mayan calendar." "Yeah, everybody says that. But if the Mayans are so f-----g smart, where are they now?"
It was my birthday anyway.
So a friend was asked, 'oh, you're from Idaho, do you eat a lot of potatoes?' and he said, 'no. Do you eat a lot of dick?' And this is just a fantastic all-purpose response. But it's important to say it with perfect beatific grace and kindness, as a legitimate inquiry. This fish has that grace. That fish will swear at you to your face, ask you 'what'djoo do that for, you crazy bitch?' and you will experience it as an act of love.
I find this very hypnotic.
We were talking about some wilderness camp personal development experience? Can't remember now. Can't know; can't be known.
'Galileo wanted to show them the moons of Jupiter in his telescope, but they refused to even look, because they did not believe that you could learn things about the world through observation rather than buried in ancient texts.'
Upgraded to CS4 last December, and suddenly everything I knew how to do in Flash was called "classic". We can pretend that this means "old school" but we both know what it means. It means "old". Right now, I can make the bird jump with the new tools. And he jumps here.
DDX's introduction: 'so I have this friend Erica, and she's an I'm-crazy-but-in-a-good-way-and-I-like-to-take-it-out-on-the-drawings kind of person.' and yes. The Erica Dreisbach Story.
Why delay gratification? My co-worker's teenage daughter understands this. Why wait to put out the good china for an important occasion? Today, today is an important occasion. Put out the good china today. If you have china. I don't have china. Maybe today I can put out the good mug, the one with the samurai on it. Yeah.
What do you think about building a screenplay with a character called Ex-Jesus, and he'll run around interpreting Ex-Scripture? He may also be modeled off of Samuel Johnson.
Perhaps all people are unlockable, perhaps there exists some kind of beautiful, deep, meaningful connection with another person that is just one question away. I have auditioned many dozens of these questions in pursuit of the One Ultimate Question, that which unlocks all hardnesses of hearts.
The first law of thermodynamics is: there is no thermodynamics.
Where am I. I'm still here. Like Ahasver, yes, I am still here. Jittering. But here.
No one seems to mind too much that I draw through meeting. Which is good. Otherwise, my mind would be wandering to other (unprofessional) topics.
I did not go to UoC but I am a friend to UoC and a fan of UoC and I will scav with UoC (and live with UoC and die(?) with UoC).
Remember that time you were on a blind date, and it wasn't going very well, and so you asked about what pets the person had growing up, and the person said, 'I had a goldfish,' and as a joke you said, 'oh, was it named Goldy,' and the person said 'YES,' and you suddenly remembered you had to be somewhere else? I remember.
In 'A Swiftly Tilting Planet', the climax comes down to the actions of a single mitochondria in one person's body. I think sometimes about the personalities of my cells, of planets, their romances and sorrows, taking place at scales incomprehensible to me, no less real.
San Francisco, this comick is for you.
This is a tough one to explain, as a female and feminist.
Daring pick-up lines of my past have involved the words "do you know why I'm here?". Also: the word "concatenate".
On change, and change-makery, and change-demanders.
There are some things you won't understand 'til you're younger.
Remember how I was going to learn how to make this page scripted? Remember, from your days of reading the top of this page? I remember. I continue to lovingly hand-code this page the hard way. The hard way is the easy way. I've heard that our brains prefer a familiar path, even if it's painful, over an untried one. This is why we might stick with painful people/thoughts/habits. This is why innovators are to be prized that much more dearly.
I like that maturity may not be a function of age. Maybe not at all. Maybe not even a little tiny.
This sounded like something terrific, as in terrifying. I have confidence that: even if this story never actually occurred, something as horrifying and beautiful *has* occurred, somewhere. So you might as well believe this one.
It isn't the first time I've drawn myself drawing the comic. And it won't be the last. Related: hermeneutic. Does that sound vaguely lewd to anyone else as well?
This was a cute movie. A cute movie that somehow involved torture. I think cuteness must thus be decoupled from actual content? Lightness of function not impacted by heaviness of form? Milan reminds us that nothing is heavy. This is a good thing to remember.
Mistofer just emailed me, to say that you can tell I'm crazy because I start my emails with "gug". Oh. Oh oh. I start a lot of things with a lot more than that, I can tell you right now. I tell you.
New thoughts on magic: that it's a miracle that human beings can comprehend each other ever, that there is any correspondence between the things in my head and the things in yours, that this is no less a miracle than lifting the X-wing from the swamp. This was a magical event.
Granted, my Myers-Briggs and enneagram personality types lead me to value action over process. But c'mong. There's only so much we can talk about talking about change. At some point, change's gotta come, do you feel me?
Jeffrey says, 'I want to be like you, an artist.' Oh mang, Jeffrey, I want to be like you!
What are the sparklies? I realized I had drawn talk bubbles, but an empty conference room. I considered drawing my teammates as little bugs or birds, but then got creative (read: lazy) and did sparklies instead.
Not everyone's going to get this... prolly should stick to 'happy anagrams', huh?
Special thanks to Astrochin Hanuman on this one, for the second interpretation of "Tree Skiing".
I may be best served by getting serious with animating rigid objects like robots. Introducing the Mechanical Bird. The Mechanical Bird's wings will go up and the metal feathers clunk down after the wings fall. The Mechanical Bird tries to catch a bouncing ball. The Mechanical Bird encounters Baba Yaga's chicken-footed cottage, and thinks it's its mother. Inspiration flows natural-like from the Mechanical Bird.
"It must be terrible to be a mime. Always trying to express these ideas, unable to." "...you're describing my life."
Today's comic is dedicated to Portia from South Africa, who met me on Eureka and 18th this morning, and sang me songs in her native and non-native languages, and shared the company of her young charge Henry, sitting wise and grandfatherly like Kuato from a sling against her ventral side.
Brother says: 'I don't believe in wasting time. As a thing that a person can do, or as a thing that even exists.' My brothers are geniuses.
Sleep deprivation is one of my favorite altered states. The self-consciousness that socializes some of the natural loopiness out of my personality, it shuts off. "She's holding back on her natural loopiness?" you refrain from asking, and for that, I thank you.
In these movies, the family living on Endor is joined by bracelets that give the health status of every other family member. And this is how I feel in real life to my family and to others carried close in my heart. uTube does not have filmic evidence of this. Dear Readers are asked to trust my memory (a risk, I certainly).
Thank you for your help in defining what it means to live in a magical world, what it is to meet a magical person. It's all a matter of perspective, the proper view askew. You are but two crossed-eyes away from auras, colors, synchronicities, and the last peels of death toll for belief in a probabilistic universe governed by chance.
I'm starting it, I'm arting it. Here we go, Dear Readers.
From the Department of Dating Dos: graphics, PowerPoints, flow charts. Also signage, banners, LCD projection. Also Lavalier mics, podcasts, and explanatory pop-up text. Additionally, anything spiral, case, or plastic comb bound.
Remember that book, The Game? Oh mang, I read that book and lost the ability to feel animal attraction for about a fiscal quarter. If it's all just a hack, well then. What is the freeping point?
Animal attraction has since returned. Thankfully. But the power of the old incantations maintains...
Fiscal advice, circa Taira Shigesuke Japan.
Today's comic references Johnny Ramone. Let's all think about how there has been a void in this site, a missing toe from the electronic footprint, for not having referenced said before.
Do you ever get the sense that you are around a human being who brushes the hairs on his or her head more times than you do over the course of a significantly longer span of time?
During the Oath, I clutched my heart like a ruby quartz shield to keep from blasting the room with love. When he said, "we will restore science..." I raised a fist of power. "Sci-ENCE!"
On the radio, they're talking about Dustin Hoffman's movie, that he's "taking a chance, on love!" I'm smiling at the copywriter who put that down on a piece of paper, the manager who approved it, and the announcer who now says it out loud to millions of people.
Missing from the Lexicon: a word or term for learning things (like software) by futzing with them. Or breaking them. You have to break it to learn how to fix it. It's like surgery: cut to heal. Right?
You know how one of my New Year's Resolutions is to lay off the caffeine? Yeah. About that.
I like beautiful independent noise-music. I like strings-intensive corporate music. I like hi-res audio. I like shitty MIDI. How to reconcile? I do not know. But the songstresses of the 1960s are pretty unimpeachable. Try to impeach them; you will find you cannot.
It's all part of the journey.
From the Department of Nonrational Thought: maximizing the web browser makes me feel like I'm missing other things going on on the desktop. Related: the paranoia that one's toys are motile when one is not in one's room. Related: the persistent nagging question of "what would you do, if a monster came running down the street, right now. Right now. What would you do?"
The locus of my romantic imagination used to be the computer lab at school. Now it is on various forms of public transportation. Perhaps this is because they are the sites of many of my thinking hours? And because I associate thinking with romance? That doesn't sound right...
Thank you for a year of bringing me to laughter so strong I jumped up and down or dropped to my knees. Thank you for regularly sending me running for pen and paper to scrawl out something you just said.
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