brit's worried about her baby?

probably not, but I just had to test out posting directly from Flickr. pretty sweet :)

the scrounging

since this thing here that I post to went on life support over the past year, i've kinda been bummed. i've felt like it was a part of my life that was sort of introspective or something. self congratulatory maybe? cry for attention? bordedom? a place to pretend to question my actions on the internet?

well, i've never really been happy with the lack of my art i've put into this blog which is one of the reasons it exists. the other of course is to rant like a crotchety, out of touch, cynical loud mouth. of all of those things, the truth is, i'm really only out of touch, otherwise i'm quite nice.

so I poked through some drawings just now and grabbed this one because its not offensive, and also because it looks like Britney* Spears a little bit, maybe back when she had her dark hair... and I thought to myself... Britney* knows what it's like to be a scrounge I bet, this is the perfect filler for a post on the ol' blog.

poor girl.



and just so you know, that pic wasn't originally meant to be Britney, but... well... she gets around I guess...
__________________
*brit-knee, not brit-UH-knee

and whats up with... ?!?

...apologies to coco.... ;)

have you noticed how songs these days*... (sign of the times? is that what old men* are going to say in the 21st century? "Why these songs today... why I oughtta.... mumble mumble....zzzzzzz......zzzzzz..... )

so, have you noticed how songs these days... you know they do that old trick in the middle of the song... like, okay, let's take a little break, keep the rhythm going... but, I'm going to make a phone call... ring ring...

in the old days when the band/musician/songwriter/producer/engineer/wacked out chick high on reds half awake on the couch would do the old "makin a phone call!" in the middle of the song... the line would ring... ring... and somebody would answer... or if you were in a Pink Floyd song, they wouldn't answer, or they'd hang up on you, or you'd get the operator wondering where you'd gone off too...

but in the new days, when these DJ's and hip-hoppists and electronic musicians and pop stars acting like musicians but their songs are written and produced by the money hungry big corporate record labels that you keep feeding from your wallet make a phone call, it rings and rings... and you get a damn answering machine. you *always* get an answering machine. "yo dog, call me back dog."

as if you didn't feel stupid enough rambling on to a fucking machine while no one or everyone listens, your retarded "status update" monologue could be fodder for the general listening populace... but like the clapper, or Velcro, you were late to the party.

also, i'm watching the Robot Chicken Star Wars episode, and the "Chewie combing his hair like Fonzie" gag is my favorite I think. damn fine showing there.

*sign of the times means that when you search "old men" on google images the fourth and seventh photos returned from the search are hard core porn.

incidentally, did you know the closed captioned subtitles for chewbacca have him saying nothing more than "gah" ? it's true.

clip test - edit now with more post in the post!

oh yeah, test posts on the blog. bam!

it's over there
<- (edit: not over there anymore)

and down there (pointing down symbol)




yeah, so this new thing I figured out with my google reader has me fascinated, which means i'm gonna cheap out on another blog post.

bearp.

thing is the french, are kinky... naughty... crude possibly... and they've been that way for quite some time. I don't think any of this is new information? but if you like art, old art, curios (however you spell that) you should see the kink they put on post cards... a hundred years ago...

How do be a jerk to your co-workers, part 1

If you come across some random snot trash in the hallway...



...locate the nearest office. In this case, the office belonged to a group of lovely coordinators working on a beautiful, heart wrenching film about woodchucks. Unfortunately, being in such close proximity to this newly discovered snot trash, they bear the responsibility for flinging this snot trash in to a public space, littering up our shared resourses.

So the first thing to do is to walk into the office and accuse the person most likely to be upset. That's always good for a laugh.

Or, in my case, blame it on the one person that isn't there, out of the four people sharing the office.

Then, the only appropriate thing to do is to alert the person of their trespass, and suggest a course of action to remedy their fault.

documenting the painful process of movie making... part 1

this is a real life chat over changes to a shot... I should recount it's long and painful life. It's enough to say that after months working on the shot, my animator has to virtually restart the shot from scratch, but just as he's started blocking in the new ideas, we get an audio change, not heretofore mentioned to us, that dictates a change in his action. A change that is exactly the opposite of what we've been asked to do...

(10:21:43 AM) Mack: i listened to the new audio on *****.*** and the **** was taken out.
(10:22:11 AM) Mack: from what i understood, ****** still wanted the gulp
(10:23:03 AM) Torn: ffs
(10:23:10 AM) Torn: i gotta find out wtf is happenning
(10:23:23 AM) Mack: madness i tell you............madness!
(10:25:11 AM) Torn: we're boned
(10:25:56 AM) Mack: i have grown immune to the boning

dark times....


* just like a government document, important information not available for civilian eyes has been blacked out. it's going to be a very funny movie though, trust me.

frosted face

Today at work...

Rob: "Rob leaves the room, you guys stay in the room, do whatever then leave, Rob comes back to the room, and Simon's face is covered in frosting."

************

This is my real life.

life in the dungeon

Animation Director: "Can we get bigger nuts? These nuts are a little small."

VFX Superviser: "Yeah, we've got all different sized nuts, we can look at our nuts and see how big of nuts you want."

Animation Director: "Okay. When we shot this we weren't sure how many nuts we needed and we didn't want to pack it full of nuts."

VFX Supervisor: "Well, that's no problem. We'll take a look at the nuts and choose which ones we want to put in there."

Animation Director: "That would be great!"


*************

That is a true and (pretty darn) accurate recounting of my dailies yesterday... It's good to be alive.

ce n'est pas

...He played a lot of chess...

He searched a lot. Maybe somebody already said what he wanted to say. He searched for it. Though he knew the words weren't his... The were stolen, and they were empty. God said why. It could have been funny. He searched for that too. Did he ever feel like he was chained? Did he ever feel trapped? Trapped by fate? Why, he felt it was just so much of a tour bus, he gave directions to the driver, but if the driver turned on a street he said to, wasn't it only by coincidence? Wasn't it? So many wrong turns made, it was statistically improbable. Maybe it was okay to show only a reflection of what really was him.

He supposed.

I guess that was the only thing that kept him distracted.

well, now...

I suppose if I were to be working on some top secret movie about some kind of rodents who were related to one another... and maybe just one of them were abducted by a top secret government agency whom did some kind of something or other to their bone structure... containing the word adamantium... and hair... this creature could possibly be... as unattractive as this...

usurpation of authority, right?

this is a story of two rebels. you are very excited right now, i can see.

it's a tuesday evening and the time is brutal, the usual adjectives like rushed and hectic apply, the perfect culmination of a scheme so grand as to challenge the delicate hands within which it is grasped, as they ring life from lifeless circumstances and run on sentences from the tender white of a blank page. or computer screen. unless it's not white. a lot of people have a different background color than white on their computers.

the occassion is a presentation of the independent film, "Waitress", a film by Adrienne Shelly, at the Arclight theatre in hollyweird.

the players were two wonderful humans, referred to as 'he' or 'she', or perhaps, 'him' and 'her', for reasons not expressly evident.

hurry to the theatre, barely on time. but wait! it's a screening held by the notorious AFI and the ubiquitous (not really, i'm just molesting the thesaurus at this point) SAGindie. said parties, in full display of their own personal pomp, ran an extremely tight security check. with little to no effort, him and her brought in two cameras and one knife. without meaning to of course. one camera was attached to a cel phone, the other forgotten in a coat pocket, and the knife, merely a tool for cutting things like wire, or boxes when people around him say "Damn, I really need a knife to open this right now." well you know what? bam! there's a knife right when you need it. maybe someday in the future humans won't need to open things, or separate one thing from another, but until that day, a few prepared humans will hold the gateway to the contents of sealed boxes... well... they waved the metal detector over his pocket and it grew exited passing over the knife. too be fair, the pocket also contained a bunch of keys, but the knife's clip was quite visible outside the pocket. at any rate, he was asked, "Keys?" to which he responded, "Yes." The cameras were mostly forgotten in a purse.

They were there to watch a movie, not change the world, so just calm the fuck down you knee jerk grass eating marxist freaks.

it's a short story really. i was going to drag it out, but honestly i don't feel like it. plus i have to get back to work. and that was really the main point. him and her did ditch the famous actors during the Q&A, leaving right in the middle of the discussion in plain view of all the serious films buffs who would never deign to have the balls to us this many participle phrases to explain how they ditched famous actors in favour of hot apple pie from the apple pan. there is another blog elsewhere in the ether that delves into the fantastic world of celebrity elbow rubbing, but you can't read it. it's private. so solly chollie, no linky for you.

also, my shift key sticks so i decided instead of having a bunch of random capital letters floating about i'd just skip it's use altogether. gotta love a blog that expounds on the usage of the keyboard upon which it is composed... or not...

irony or karma?

So I'm eating salad for lunch. Chinese chicken salad. I have too many bananas. How lucky for me. I'd better eat them soon before they turn brown and shrivel. And I think my apples are going to taste mealy soon. That should be enough fuel for penis jokes, so when you finish patting yourself on the back for having an I.Q. of 68, read the next paragraph.

After dailies, standing at the top of the stairs discussing unrelated importance of something or other, she walks by. Replete with black nail polish and a little left over eyeliner. From a pirate party she says. Excellent. Pirates are second only to robots. And robots are second only to monkeys. And monkeys are second only to bacon. As tasty as it is, monkey bacon just isn't the same as pig bacon. And robot bacon hurts my teeth. And pirate bacon will send you right back to the first paragraph, with the addition of a pole-boy* reference.

So she passes by us, interupting our conversation with her pirate left overs, and walking down the stairs she says how, with all the black, she's feeling like an angsty high school kid today.

I suggested listening to some Depeche Mode.

Like bittersweet justice, or a moment of sad emotional nakedness, I find myself, without realizing it at first, listening to Depeche Mode while eating my salad and writing this blog.

Sigh.




___________________
* pole-boy. Apparently this is a young man, kept aboard a sailing vessel in times of old, who was, while not in 'service', was seated on a pole, as a means of loosening up the exit ramp of his interstate where food is transported from the docks to the local convenience store, so as to facilite the reversal of the flow of traffic. If you catch my meaning. I guess 1800's sea going ships didn't really have a lot of chicks aboard. Too bad for the pole boy. I was unable to locate a substantial reference for this on the internet, and since the internet is the repository of all Truth, I suspect I have been shined on, regardless of the numerous times I've heard the phrase used. If you like the phrase, it is public domain, and fit for use in your personal communications, should you need to drive home your point.

Song of the Day, March 31st

Yeah, now this is an interesting one, I wake up with Carmen Miranda in my head. How often does this happen to you? I know you're a big fan but...

To be up front, I most likely had been listening to heavy metal, or surf music, or maybe some British band crying out some sad love song, but certainly not Carmen Miranda. I have no beef with her, in fact I think she's pretty damn cool, but I don't go around listening to her.

So, to have this song, "Mama, Yo Quero", running around in my noggin first thing in the morning (and most of the day it turns out) is, as Kirk said in Wrath of Kahn, "damn peculiar." And really, it's most likely that I only know who she is thanks to the three alley cats harassing Tom of "Tom & Jerry" fame, strutting around singing "Mama, Yo Quero" and playing Tom like a fiddle. Poor guy always had such a tough go in life, but he never let that get him down...

Where am I now?

So I spaced out. Here's a useless post to shake off the cobwebs. I think my brain went to sleep for a couple months, sort of like Cameron did just before he fell into the pool in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", taking care of it's own business, a little spring cleaning if you will... I'm guessing here...

I think it was a Buddhist monk, perhaps he was Vietnamese if memory serves, who said something about being like a glass of apple juice (now remember, most apple juice the world gets is not pasteurized so it has all kinds of apple pulp in it. I'm telling you this because it's essential to the following sentence...), you pour the juice and immediately all the pulp and juice is stirred up into a flurry, and you must wait for some time, for the pulp to settle, and the juice to become still.

Of course he isn't talking about being a glass of juice, he's talking about the state of being, for you, and I.

I think my apple juice has been continually stirred for some period of time by external and internal forces. I can't say with any certainty that it's calming down...

Song of the Day, Jan. 11th

Alright, so since this is the second one these I guess I should explain. Everyone gets a song stuck in their head from time to time, right? I have this thing where it is in my head long before I wake up, and it's there playing over and over again when I wake up, and there seems to be nothing I can do to shut it out. It'll then slowly fade over the course of the day. Often the song is something utterly surprising, like Journey in the previous post (I don't own or listen to Journey, but my folks did when I was a child.).

So this is something that I've just sort of become fascinated with, and like journaling your dreams, I'm writing down my headsongs. On more of a lark really, not that I 'care' that much, just out of curiosity.

Today's song isn't so strange, it's from an album I own, and enjoy listening to frequently, Coltsfoot Leaf, from MF Doom's Special Herbs and Spices Vol. 1.

If you like *good* beats and mixes, check it out. If you listen to Hip Hop cancer (Chuck D's words which struck a chord with me, not that I'm cool or hip to the black man's plight and the origins of spoken word set to beats, I just listen and try to understand...) on the radio, well, maybe this will expand your candy-rotted mind. Of course with any popular music there are some stand outs, but coming from the Public Enemy, NWA era (I'm old), most of what I hear sounds like record label fluff.

Not to be judgmental or anything, this is all just my opinion, no disrespect meant towards all ya'll's personal tastes and whatnot... just trying to help out over here...