Recession, Accidents, and Hope for the Future
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Re-Potting with Resources: What Would You Make?
This is an interesting article. The jist of it is that nothing in life is certain, and that concentrating on the possibility of what you really want is important. Which is why I’ve purchased this book. It’s always been a dream of mine to really be involved with the music that I love, but I wasn’t exactly sure how. I’ve figured out how to take it to the next level though: DJing. I make no presumption that it’s going to be easy or glamorous, but that’s not the point.
The simple truth of it is that I think the music I like just isn’t very common in circles around here. A few names dominating my play lists are Bonkers, Mind.In.A.Box, Iambia (thanks for the limited edition CD, Ben!)… Alternative electronica, UK Hardcore, and electronic body music. I’m not looking into this stuff because it’s not around here, either. I have a genuine love for this music that’s shared by a couple close friends… but it really doesn’t go any further than that in this country.
I also think that this love for music and active involvement with it ties closely to my love for storytelling and motionography. I can’t really look at something that’s well made or composed without thinking “damn, what’s stopping me from doing that?” Well, time to stop thinking that about music and motionography, at least.
But anyway, the point is that I have a fire in my belly when it comes to music and I’ve got to do something about it. Stay tuned for future developments.
Speaking of fire, there was a nasty accident on I-40 yesterday, and I passed it going to Chapel Hill. After cresting a hill and seeing a long line of traffic ahead, I knew there had to be a wreck or something. Leah then pointed out to me a huge column of smoke, and I noticed a fire truck and ambulance screaming up the road. Fast forward to driving past what looked like an accident (with firefighters scrambling, police milling about, and ambulances freshly gone) with a swath of fire on the side of the road and an overturned garbage hauling truck (not a collection truck, more like a freighter). I spotted a few hundred small fires smoldering on the side of the highway where it met the forest, and then the huge overturned truck full of garbage. A little bit up the road we spotted the tracks where it crossed the median before slamming into the embankment after going out of control through oncoming traffic lanes.
So in the midst of economic recession and the whole world acting crazy, something like a devastating five vehicle accident can bring things into sharp focus. At least we’re all alive to dream about what we want to do, and most of us are safe for the moment. Go think about what you’d do if you had the chance, and maybe fortune will force you to do it tomorrow (or later today).
Snow in Pullen and Obama’s inauguration
Pullen in the Snow
Took a little walk to Pullen Park today. Everything was covered in snow, and it was around sunset. Awesome. Leah and I got there a little after the Design School official sanctioned snowball fight… so the ground was a little chewed up in places and whatnot, but nothing ugly at all. It was just a little traveled. Anyway, it was beautiful.
One thing bothered me though. I noticed the geese in the park honking around like they usually do, but they seemed slower and more desperate than usual. I wished I had some food for them and whatnot, they just seemed slow and a bit downtrodden. Then I noticed the indie kids a little up the guard rail. Yeah, throwing snowballs at the birds.
Birds!
Nothing irks me more than people being genuinely inconsiderate like that. I’m no PETA follower, but that’s a crummy thing to do no matter how you slice it. They’re just ducks, geese, coots, whatever. They’re not hurting you, and if you wing a snowball at them you could hurt them.
So I started making snowballs and actively looking at the indies (not the race, the horn rim kids and the ones with ironic shoes) down the way a bit. After about five good rigid pack iceballs were made, I noticed them noticing me. Then they left their snowballs and left the park. Go team. Not the most mature thing to do, but hey, ducks can’t make snowballs. It all evens out.
Seriously guys. I mean, throwing snowballs at a gathering of ducks on the one day we get real snow? It’s not as big a crime as the bright green/black striped hoodie one horn rimmed indie was wearing, but still. Go be jerks somewhere else. I’m sure it’ll involve Helvetica somehow.
Oh yeah. We got a new president today. That was pretty cool. I’ll leave the coverage up to everyone else, but I can’t get over how hilarious Obama’s expression is here:
Benediction for Obama’s Inaugural by the Reverend Dr. Lowery (5:14 in)
The way his smile fades into a frown tells me he wasn’t given an advance copy of this benediction. When white will know what’s right? How in hell is he supposed to react to a statement like that without people getting antsy about it? Some forums have already lit up with complaints about the statement. I just think it was an awkwardly worded blurb in a line of otherwise pleasantly rhymey racial inspirational phrases.
All in all, though, great speech from Obama, and largely forgettable speeches from everyone else. Oh, and Itzhak Perlman and Yo-yo Ma were amazing.
It’s time for a new beginning!
Interesting thing happened to me recently. At SIGGRAPH2008, I won a copy of Cinema 4D Release 10.5 in the Student Volunteer giveaways. Awesome. But unfortunately, because of my work load and the hectic nature of finishing up my schooling for the foreseeable future, I didn’t get a chance to install it.
Fast forward to a couple weeks ago when I crack open the box and look for a serial during installation. Uh oh. No serial, and I needed to register within 90 days to get a valid code for installation. Great. Now I’m out $900 of free software because I didn’t install it in time.
So I send off the registration anyway, hoping that the people at Maxon could find it in their hearts to spare a key anyway. I hear nothing for about a week. I figure that they just ignored me because my code was expired anyway. It’s understandable I guess.
Then I stumbled over a package left on the front step of my apartment complex as I left for the night. Out of chance I checked the name on it (I wasn’t expecting anything) and saw “Brian Lee” on there. Weird. I opened it up and found a new commercial copy of Cinema 4D Release 11!
So not only did Maxon go out of their way and respond to my late request, they sent me the newest version! What great people. I wonder if they know what a boon this is to me; I’m going to be starting out with my motion graphics career this year and this is going to be a huge asset.
So thanks to you Maxon, and the SIGGRAPH2008 committee as well for awarding me this amazing prize.
So this is my first blog posting in a while. A few things happened since here and there: I graduated with my 2nd degree (BA in Communication with a Digital Media focus) from NCSU, signed up with The Creative Group, and have been job/freelance hunting ever since December. Oh, and I just updated the theme on my blog here, so some of my old postings may be a little broken.
At any rate, it’s a great time for a lot of new beginnings: new software, new careers, new position in life, no class, no homework… Lots of interesting changes. And hopefully I’ll get a chance to post and update here more often.
8-Bit Nostalgia
Happy retro vector art!
I just stumbled on a band after Youtubing a new game on Steam, Audiosurf.
After listening to the tracks they have posted on their Myspace Page I’ve become a big fan. They’re mostly guitar accompaniment to a pre-written Nintendo synth track (from what I can tell), but the appeal is undeniable. A lot of bitpop bands that I’ve heard just seem to write normal music and filter it through the old-style instruments. Anamanaguchi really knows what made the old music special; they impart that certain simplicity and sincerity that was inherent to the old music, and a real sense of adventure. Their song “Helix Nebula” does an excellent job of this. The bouncy lead with its close harmony, with the thumping authentic Nintendo beat behind it drives the whole feeling of old-school Nintendo home.
Finding stuff like this makes me jones for the classic NES/SNES vs. Genesis days. Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but games seemed simpler and better back then. Games actually needed merit to do well (although I know there were a fair share of big name flops that sold well), emphasizing solid control, replayability, and innovative system tricks (hell, SNES games were written in Assembly. That’s hardcore) that pushed the hardware to its limits. Plus, any modern RPG has yet to top Final Fantasy III (Japanese VI) or Chrono Trigger, even with their fancy polygons and DVD quality FMV.
If I hear one more person exalt Halo as an excellent game, I’m gonna send them a download link to Starsiege: Tribes, a game that’s better in every way (except graphics) and beat them to the punch by 3 years. Not that they’re qualified for direct comparison, but there are so many first person shooter games that wipe the floor with Halo several times over.
Macgyver’d
I brought Guitar Hero 3 into CapStrat today, along with my PS2 and one guitar controller. After hooking it up to one of the widescreen monitors, Carson warned me that the audio input/output didn’t work on the monitor. Essentially, we needed to get the audio signal directly to the speakers, from two male RCAs to a standard miniplug. We found an adapter which would turn the miniplug into another two male RCAs, but that didn’t get us anywhere… So I cooked this up.
Front view
Top view
Using nothing but a paper clamp and the clip from a Pilot Uniball, I was able to get one channel going for Guitar Hero. Needless to say, I’m pretty happy with the solution… Because it was free and it works.
We’re All Producers
My friend Ben, producing his own media.
We’re getting way too focused. Over dinner with a friend the other day, we discussed that as far as human beings go, we’re getting pretty specialized. It’s generally accepted by [most of industrialized] society that as we grow up, we go to school, and eventually settle into a profession (or a handful of them). Very few people actually do everything for themselves; these professions allow us to become interdependent and concentrate on our own slice of the work. It’s a great way to make sure quality services and products are developed, but there are obvious trade-offs.
When did entertainment become one of those slices? I see people eat food they didn’t make, live places they didn’t build, and use goods they didn’t craft. So why not apply the same principle to how we relax and enjoy ourselves?
Maybe I’m a little biased. Right now I’m working as a digital media designer, and as a result, work with many of the same tools that the mass media use. Among other things, I write/remix/play music, make animations, and write stories for myself. As a result, I look at the mass media not just as a consumer, but as a student and competitor. I love watching a well directed story, but at the same time a little voice in my head says “When are you going to do that?”
A lot more people these days seem to be asking the same question. With the advent of YouTube, Newgrounds, and similar sites that are based on user created content, a culture of media literacy and homegrown entertainment is being nurtured. You’ve heard it all before, everyone’s a director, animator, performer now, with an audience that reaches most corners of the civilized globe. It’s a great creative outlet, and the potential is enormous. I heard from a friend that the writer’s strike is actually causing people to depend on YouTube for entertainment. Pretty amazing if you ask me.
But is this the voice of all the people that were producing media anyway? Or have we gotten to the point where people who wouldn’t normally produce are doing so? Is the next step revisiting the days when families had at least one piano player in the house? I wonder if families might even become amateur production studios, and take home movies to a new level. Dad handles the A/V, junior writes and performs the soundtrack, mom does the writing, and sis takes on the lead role.
I’m all for anything that takes our dependence off the mass media. I know we still tend to get our news through the usual channels, and nothing amazes quite like a big budget Hollywood blockbuster. I just hope that despite the huge entertainment industry, more people are realizing the value and satisfaction of homegrown media. Not to mention that instead of listening to homogenized and carefully calculated beliefs and values, people could dodge mass media hegemony long enough to learn for themselves.
Maybe it’s because of my profession, but I see entertainment as one of the great opportunities for expression this society isn’t taking advantage of. We have the means, technology, and tools, why isn’t this second nature? Don’t we all have this incredible urge to create, tell our stories, and perform our songs?
I write this, of course, while smelling food that someone else is cooking, on a computer I didn’t assemble, in a house I didn’t build. I’m sure all of those things are just as important to other people as the aforementioned media are to me… Does that make me short-sighted? Maybe.
Cheese Story
Tonight at about 1 AM, I was wandering through Harris Teeter with my friends Matt and Whitney for something to eat. I noticed something strange when looking through the exotic cheeses. Some of the cheese had a massive discount.
Really massive.
Fourteen pounds of cheese for fourteen cents! I couldn’t believe it. Matt found the other half of the wheel of cheese for eleven cents, too! We wandered around a little more, picked up some Hebrew National blanketed beef pigs, and hit the U-Scan. When I scanned in the cheese, laughing like a moron, the U-Scan clerk came over and checked on it in disbelief. We exchanged a little confused smalltalk, but he let it go by. I mean, if it’s on a printed label, it has to be right, right? There was something else strange about the clerk, though…
Your cashier: Moo?! And yes, I paid with a real quarter.
Apparently, the cow gods were smiling on us, and this was their way of letting us know they were watching. My cashier was Moo. Moo. So next we drove home with fits of excited laughter. We didn’t really know if the cheese was any good, so we were honestly just going to drop it off a parking deck if it was nasty.
25 pounds of cheese. For $.25.
We put the cheese back together at home. Twenty-five pounds of cheese. For a quarter. Or just over a quarter with tax. Whatever. We smelled the cheese and didn’t know what to think. Smelled like old cheese, so we decided to take a few glamour shots of it.
Cheese with size comparison to egg.
Heroic Matt, with the cheesy spoils of victory. Or the spoiled cheese of victory. Or whatever.
So now it was the moment of truth. We cut open Matt’s half of the cheese and carved a little chunk off. We looked at each other with hesitation, and downed our pieces simultaneously. Surprisingly, it was good. Really good. Like what you would expect from actual exotic and high priced cheese good.
I can’t believe we’re not vomiting!
We were pretty stunned. Having just acquired twenty-five pounds of delicious cheese for a quarter is no less than incredibly lucky. If you believe cheese and luck have much to do with each other, that is. I do now, but that goes without saying.
Matt and Whitney basking in the cheese’s cheesiness.
So out of curiousity, I looked the cheese up online. It’s Beemster Classic Extra Aged Gouda. Sounds nice. But could it really be worth anything?
Classic.
Apparently so. Amazon has it listed by the pound at $13.99, which would put our haul at $350. Which, need I remind you, we bought for a quarter. Every other place on the net seems to offer it for about the same price, but I never actually found a place you can order a whole wheel. Maybe it costs a little less, who knows.
What I do know is what kind of cheese I’ll be eating for the next couple months.
Update:
Vishal wanted an update, so here’s an update. The cheese is still delicious. It goes well on Club crackers. I’m going to be hacking off a couple ten degree pieces and giving them to select cheese aficionados in the office. My roommate Eric says the cheese is a little salty for Gouda, and I agree. But it’s still damn good. Also, Matt, I just thought you should know that I’m glad you have some cheese to go with your whine. Har har.
Update 2:
I was hacking off some pieces of cheese for Lou and David this morning, and found the original price tag for the cheese.
That has got to be the most expensive thing I’ve ever seen in a Harris Teeter.
Pullen
Pullen at Sunset
I took a walk in Pullen Park today. It was sunset.
I’m really beginning to appreciate this place. I think I’ll be walking more and more around there, because it’s only about a 5 minute stroll from my apartment. It’s also a really great place to think, and to just enjoy the weather.
The weather’s been a lot cooler lately in the evenings, so I’m definitely looking forward to more of this.
It begins
Just got Wordpress working for a simple blogging website on the new domain, Wondershock.com. I hope to put some great stuff up here, and eventually have a real website for my portfolio up and running.