A Wax Lion of One's Own

I just got round to checking this blog again (filled as I was with fear and loathing that some of those hardcore folks might follow me home from Jane's blog comments) and realized I'd left things on rather a downer note over here. So hey, September's here, the cat is on the mend, and my job is frustrating but tolerable. The toy company we're partnered with which rhymes with Eggo has been having some issues with our budget--namely, not enough of it is being spent on Eggo models. So for our next exhibit, they're requesting a guarantee of a certain amount being spent on Eggo, which may pretty much shoot all our ideas for using interesting technology for our interactivity. This makes me sad... But I am all about the trying to find ways to combine models with interactives. I'm trying to look at the whole thing as a spur for my creativity rather than an "Aw, crap, seriously??"

In other news, checking my sitemeter to see who the hell has been bothering to hit on this thing (so to speak) in the last month, I see that I am most commonly found by people who are trying to track down the wax lion from Wonderfalls. That is, of course, my moniker for a reason--I love the lion. He's a wise sage, and yet fantastically annoying, two things I aspire to in both my home and professional life. But if you're honestly looking for a wax lion of your very own, you need to find a Mold-a-Rama machine with the Standing Lion die, and pony up the $1.50 to get it. I got mine at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago; the lion Mold-a-Rama is right outside the exit to the dolphin building, and when I was there a year ago, it did indeed have orange wax loaded in for us big nerds. It won't be all smooshed and melty, mind you... but we can't all be defective.

Back and Forth

I haven't been posting much on this blog lately, obviously. I can't really say for sure whether it's that I've been in a good mood (this being the blog I channel the moodiness to, and when I'm feeling good I'm more likely to post to the main one) or whether it's actually that I've been mildly depressed on and off lately, but felt that blogging about it would be unproductive. Not that blogging is ever all that Productive to begin with, mind you!

I'm kind of suspicious it's the latter. I haven't really been rolling with the various punches all that well in the last couple months, and relatively little bitty stuff has been rocking my world a bit. Work today was good, I got to do some fun stuff... and yet there were some setbacks on a couple projects I'm working on, and I came home with a hefty dose of angry sitting somewhere in my midsection which has yet to fully wear off. Tomorrow, I suspect, will be much the same. But these things don't last forever, and the state fair is this week. There's nothing wrong with me that a corndog and a lemon shake-up won't cure...

This Seems Like a Bad Start.

I'm in the airport, en route to England, and already we're under an "air traffic delay." I should have been on my way to Newark a half hour ago already, and instead I ponied up $8 for wi-fi and am sitting staring out the window at the plane I am not yet permitted to board. To add to the indignity, I really have to go to the bathroom but do not feel like packing up the laptop and hauling my two carry-ons up the concourse so as not to leave them unattended as targets for bomb sniffing dogs. Sigh.

Ironically, the plane's engine reads "Express Jet." Right now, I am expressly not jetting anywhere.

Returned from the Depths...

Howdy, folks. Been a while. The month of May was utterly hellish--started with death, ended with disease, and there was more fun in between. But I have bounced back with a flourish, more or less.

I was going to do some serious downer blogging about my friend who died, and I just never could make myself do it. I had so many thoughts swirling around in my brain, and just couldn't quite get them to gel--it had to do with friendship and the nature thereof, and how you sort out a person's true self from all the crud that can accrue over years of substance abuse. Was the Paul I knew more the "real" Paul than the one that the other 200 people at his funeral had come to know over the last 20 years? How do you separate out his growth as a person from all the messed-up-shit that came from too much acid and heroin? I couldn't come to a satisfactory answer, and thinking about it just made me sad.

However, I'd been mulling over another post that I think turns out to be in some ways related. I've been reading Spandau, which is a diary account of life inside Spandau prison by Hitler's architect, Albert Speer. I've always been troubled by the question of how Hitler's Reich came about--how someone who (to modern American eyes) seems so un-charismatic, and so obviously on the brink of madness, could have persuaded an entire nation of people to embark upon a war of aggression against the entirety of Europe. Not every German who joined the National Socialists was made of pure evil (my mother's opinions of the German nation to the contrary.) So what are we to make of someone like Speer, who seems in so many ways to be an intelligent, thoughtful, and entirely normal man--and yet played a key part in the most monstrous genocidal act in history? Speer was the only one of Hitler's close associates to admit his culpability at Nuremburg, though he denied having had direct knowledge of the death camps. Of course that probably wasn't true--it's hard to imagine that he wouldn't have, and there's some evidence to the contrary. But what interests me more about Spandau is Speer's own musings--he had 20 years to think about it--on why he did what he did, and whether Speer-the-architect-of-the-Reich was the true Albert Speer. Was he a different person before he met Hitler? And did admitting guilt and taking punishment for the acts committed on Hitler's orders absolve him at all? It's interesting, and I've been thinking about it a lot. (Had plenty of time for thinking and reading while I was sick... bleh.) Anyway, hopefully back to a more regular posting schedule now--and hopefully less depressing posts!

A Week of Glorious Triumph

This week at work consisted of prep for big meetings, then three solid days of said big meetings with our exhibit partner whose name is similar to "Eggo," only their product is small plastic interlocking bricks rather than fortified breakfast waffles. It went really well. I think we showed them a good time, and our upcoming exhibit looks to be nothing short of fantastic. We may have the opportunity to create further exhibits with their toys if this one pans out, including a hot movie property whose name rhymes with "Bar Floors."

Honestly, I probably could be a lot more forthright about who we're working with, but it's way more entertaining to make up code words. Or maybe I'm just still giddy at the thought of one of my exhibit proposal documents being read by someone at Mucousfilm....

Hey, it's AWESOMETASTIC!

I woke up with a sinus headache this morning, which was awesometastically wonderful--it took me more than 2 hours to shake it and become the shining example of productivity that I normally am on weekend mornings. My excitement/obsession for the week unfortunately requires me to spend a lot of time staring at my computer screen, which doesn't mesh well with sinus headache for me. (I'm always inclined to call these things migraines, though I don't technically think that's what they are. They start as a sinus issue, but then they're worsened by visual stimulus like bright light or rapid eye movements--so maybe they're si-graines? or migruses? Anyway... whatever. Better now.)

The new fascination is with a fantastically expensive piece of animation software called "Toonboom Studio," which I discovered earlier this week. I downloaded the free 30 day trial version on my Mac, but the learning curve on it is rather steep and I fear most of the 30 days will be spent trying to figure out how the hell it works. (Much like Adobe Illustrator in this respect--I know full well that me using Adobe Illustrator is like your grandma taking her Lamborghini Reventon to the grocery store and back.) The problem is that 90% of its amazing features pertain to 3-D digital animation, and I'm interested primarily in 2-D. I know Flash is the starting place for most people with this, but my understanding is that Flash is primarily designed for people doing simple web animations and is a bit clunky for "real" (ie, film style) animation. I'm working my way through the Toonboom Studio tutorial, but I've already run into the hurdle that I do not own a Wacom tablet and have no intention of buying one. I'm just using my touchpad mouse to get through the tutorials. So the part where they say "trace over this figure" ends up looking like a deranged chimpanzee got hold of the Wacom stylus. But I'm hoping that working through the tutorials anyway will give me a handle of how basic features work, and I can apply them to imported 2-D pen and ink drawings which is what I had in mind in the first place. There's actually a stripped down "express" version of Toonboom Studio which is much cheaper, and I bet the features I'd lose by not buying the $350 version are the ones I'd not use anyway. But we'll see. I'm still looking for other 2-D programs to download and fiddle with.

When I finish a full 5 seconds of animation, I will post it here for you loyal readers and you can marvel at my drawin' skillz...

Stupid, Stupid, Stupid.

When I first started working at the game store in high school, there were a couple of guys about my age who were regular customers and occasional employees. One was named Brad, and one was named G.J. Brad had a fairly sunny disposition, was smart, had a good sense of humor, and I enjoyed his company. G.J. was kind of a dick; he took a long time to grow up, occasionally treated his friends badly, and was generally obnoxious. I didn't dislike him, he could be a nice guy when he wanted to--but he was difficult. Brad went on to work at the store for a few years back when I was the assistant manager, then moved on to other things. G.J. disappeared for a while, then reappeared looking for work one Xmas; I hired him to help in our seasonal puzzle store, he helped for a week or two, and then--as I remember it--quit. Later on I heard that G.J. had joined the military. Good for him, I thought--he's the sort that will be improved by a stint of enforced respect, organization, and responsibility. That was about 10 years ago.

In January, I unexpectedly ran into Brad. It was great to see him--he's managing a restaurant now. We caught up, and I told him that a few of our older coworkers had died in the last couple years. "Wow, that sucks," he said. "Did you hear about G.J.?"

Your premonition upon reading that sentence is probably correct. G.J. suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury in Iraq--but he didn't die in Iraq. It was a minor injury, he served out his deployment with increasingly bad migraine headaches. Then he came back to the states for treatment. He died in the Fort Knox "Warrior Transition Unit" in September of last year. He didn't die from his injury--the injury took place a full year before his death. He died from an accidental overdose of prescribed medications for his continuing pain and depression. He died in his bedroom at Fort Knox; no one checked on him for three days despite his failure to show up for mandatory roll-calls. He was apparently unconscious for a full day before he went into respiratory failure and died--during which 24 hours he could have been given treatment which probably would have saved him. They finally found his body because his increasingly frantic wife called the fort to find out why he wasn't returning her calls or picking up his messages. If you have a desire to read the full story of G.J.'s death and his family's fight to get answers from the military about how it happened, you can read it here.

This has been big news in the local paper. Our governor is demanding answers from Ft. Knox, Ft. Knox is blaming his doctor, his doctor is blaming the military, the military is complaining that they're shorthanded. For myself, I don't know if the military made G.J. a better person; from some things I'd heard here and there over the last decade, it probably didn't. Once a kind-of-a-dick, always a kind-of-a-dick. Still, it was his career of choice, and if he had died on a battlefield in Iraq or Afghanistan, I could have been glad that he'd died doing something he personally believed in and cared about. But the military--that band of brothers that promises never to leave a man behind--lied to G.J. They left him behind, when a 10 minute walk to his room by the platoon sergeant who noticed his absence at roll call could have saved his stupid life. Fuckers.

My God.... It's Full of Stars...

I did it. I finally did it. I signed up for Marvel comics online. Now I can read through their library of thousands of comics in beautifully scanned gloriousness... What's even better is that if I pull up an old issue of, say, Uncanny X-Men to get the background of a particular character, they'll also let me know if that series of issues has been reprinted in a trade recently so if I wanted to own them in hard copy format, I could. But I like that this gives me a chance to read some books that I'd never bother to buy--never will I be bored on the internets again!

The tipping point was helping our collections department go through a collection of comics acquired from a local business scion's family on Monday. We wanted to grab some stuff that was likely to get used in the exhibit, and since I have a lot of basic knowledge about comics from the era during which this collection was amassed, I got to be the helper bee. Which meant in the course of about 7 hours I looked at the covers of probably about 10,000 comics. Mostly Spiderman, Batman, Superman, Hulk, X-Men in all their various stripes, and Fantastic Four--but plenty of other stuff too. It was great fun, pulling out suggestive or otherwise entertaining covers to show each other--Spiderman covers from the 1970's are endlessly hilarious--and of course tons of it was a trip down memory lane for me. I started collecting around 1985 or 86, and spent about $20 a month on comics until around 1996 or so. The collection we were picking up was amassed by a guy about my age, who spent more like $200 a month on comics during that exact same period of time. Our tastes were similar; so many of the books he had, I have, and I remember reading them with great fondness.

Might be time to drag out the longboxes and start reading from the beginning....

The Things That Pass For Knowledge...

Is it just me, or is there some sort of strange Steely Dan convergence going on in local radio at the moment?

I'm serious, every time I get in my car and flip through my radio stations, there's Steely Dan. And I've got nothing against them, mind you. I enjoyed them a lot back in the 80's, and I'm always happy to sing along with Reelin' In the Years now and then when I happen across it. But in the last two weeks, it's like there's some kind of Perfect Storm of Steely Dan on the radio. I noticed it at first when I'd be driving to work in the morning and hear I Got the News, and then on the drive home 8.5 hours later I'd hear it again, or another one just like it on a different station. Now it's to the point that when I got out of the car at Trader Joe's this evening, Black Cow was on 103.9; I got back in the car 20 minutes later and 93.9 is playing Deacon Blues. WTF, Steely Dan??? Why are you following me????

The likely possibility is that it's because two of the 5 stations I tend to listen to have recently gone to "Oldies of the 60's, 70's, and 80's" (and fuck you very much by the way, for including the 1980's in that format) and Steely Dan had a lot of hits in those decades. But I'm not hearing, say, America's Muskrat Love every day or two.... I'm not hearing the electronic stylin's of Duran Duran and Rio every time I start my car. It's weird, I tell you. Weird.

Apres Moi, le Snowluge

Supposedly, we're having a blizzard tonight. Supposedly. I am all stoked to be snowed in; fed my parents' birds and fish a little extra this evening in case I can't make it there in the morning; stayed a few minutes late at work getting a project to a good stopping point in case I can't get in tomorrow. And so? The snow?

NOWHERE. Not a fucking flake so far, and it's now 4 hours after it was supposed to start coming down with a vengence. I cannot even convey how disappointing this is, it's like there's some kind of forcefield around the city preventing me, personally, from receiving the promised snow. Even the weather radar shows that I should be up to my ears in it by now--but direct Window-Cam technology confirms that this is a massive load of bull crap. I'm so depressed I may just go to bed early in hopes I will wake up to a winter wonderland and the museum being closed. (That almost never happens, though. I'd settle for my car being encased in ice for the better part of the morning.)

I know, I know. If this is the worst thing I can complain about, I should be pretty damn glad with my life. But what can I say? I'm a cranky bastard. And I wants my snow.

Ashtanga? Geseundheit.

It wasn't a New Year's resolution (I don't do those, it just leads to sadness) but I did attend my first ever yoga class this weekend. I'm tired of being in kind of awful shape, and my friends who do yoga seem to like it. I've always been leery of it, as I've got no interest in the spiritual aspects of yoga at all; I've got a spiritual system that works very well for me, and while there's certainly nothing wrong with the philosophies behind yoga, it just doesn't really jive with my personality. But my friend the expert informed me that ashtanga yoga does not have to have a spiritual component to it--there's no chanting or meditating, just a very intense athletic workout over a series of stretches. So I figured, what the hell Archie, wotthehell? and set off for a Saturday morning class.

The most surprising thing for me was that it was a lot easier than I expected. By easier, I don't mean that it wasn't a serious workout--I am mighty sore today--but I was anticipating that there would be some positions I just Could Not Do, Period. And that was not the case at all. There were plenty of stretches where my limited flexibility prevented my going "all the way," but nothing where I couldn't get at least a semblance of close. A lot of the stretches reminded me of the warmups we'd do before fencing practice in college--same essential position and movements, but the stretches are held instead of doing 10 quick repetitions of the movement and going on to something else. The hardest part for me were the balancing positions--my problem sinuses mean that my balance even under ideal conditions is rather poor--but I didn't actually fall over or crash into the person next to me, so I call that a success. I'll probably go at least a few more times to decide if I want to make a regular practice of it. Assuming that my hamstrings return to normal over the course of the week, that is.