notes from underground

Now I recognize that this is pure speculation, as I’ve never actually met any of them, but I’ve heard that “normal people” have nightmares about fairly mundane stuff—wolves, scary sheep, so on and so forth.

Why on earth do I have to have dreams about hard disk failure?!

In about five hours, I will be essentially done with college. I still have final projects due next week, in both animation (the “typebot” character design and rigging project) and my independent study (where I am redoing kadamwhite.com as a proper and more professional-looking portfolio website), but both of those projects feel very post-college to me. They are both courses that I took in order to better prepare for the work I intend to do professionally, not courses I took for their abstract academic value. Worlds of Russian Science-Fiction and Fantasy, for which I turned in my final project yesterday afternoon, and The History of the English Language, the exam which I will sit in two hours, are the last two proper liberal arts classes in an undergraduate career that has been heretofore dominated by humanities courses. For all that, I am going into art. It’s a strange feeling to realize how big a change this is, and yet how normal it all feels.

When I got to Brown just under four years ago, I was pretty darn convinced I was going to be either a history or an English major. If I’d taken Russom’s History of English courses a few years earlier, who knows? I might still have gone that route, and be applying to graduate programs right now. I could well have been planning to rely on my talents as a writer for my livelihood, rather than my visual side. Of course I chose East Asian Studies so I could do a bit of everything and then some, and I can’t precisely say that I am disappointed to be going into art–quite the opposite, it’s about bloody time! Still, as I prepare to leave this place I am only just beginning to realize how many other untapped courses and professors I am leaving behind as I graduate. Oh well… If there’s one thing I’ve gotten used to at Brown, it’s feeling like there’s never enough time!

Now, off to rock this exam. Back in a jiffy.

For my final project for CS128, I am going to be modeling and rigging the typewriter character I’ve been working on for the past few months. Since my two-dimensional sketches are more artistic than technical they have not been as useful for the 3D design process, so the first step I took in Maya was to modify the “dudebot” character I made a few years ago and combine his parts with a few basic typewriter elements (specifically the keys on his back) to block in the rough form of the character as he appears in my drawings. With my first love being sculpture, not drawing, this 3d mockup helps me get a much more tactile impression of the character.

I rendered this turntable out just to check that the overall proportions of the character are working. I will go back in and create new geometry for the main body elements later on, but I am pretty pleased with the overall shape of the character.

I feel like an era is finally over. Ollie Johnston, the last of the “Nine Old Men” of Disney Animation, died last Monday. I haven’t been very plugged in this week, and only just heard the news… I know he hasn’t been at the forefront of recent productions, but this man worked on Snow White. He worked on Bambi! He was the last living representative of the group of artists responsible for the most memorable films of my childhood. Sure, Aladdin and The Lion King are flashier, more modern productions, but dammit, I still cry during Bambi, and that just doesn’t happen in either of those newer films. (Well, Mufasa’s death is an occasional exception.)

I am graduating in May, and come hell or high water I am moving into the world of professional animation. I regret that it is no longer a world in which men like Ollie Johnston can take a part; that said, nearly every serious animation student I know has a copy of Ollie’s book The Illusion of Life (written with Frank Thomas, of course), so their legacy lives on.

Rest in peace—I hope I will live up to the high standards you have set for this art.

Around 4:30 yesterday afternoon the server this site is hosted on, the giant machine in our library embodying techhouse.org, was taken offline so root could migrate our services to a new, much more powerful machine. Around 11 some services were back online, including basic hosting and email, but not everything. I put up a temporary greeting page to explain why my webpage was down.

Scarcely two hours later, everything is working again. Thanks a ton for all your efforts, guys, I know how long you’ve spent working on this today and it really shows–the migration has been painless and awesome. Thanks for letting me print out my midterm before the printing services went down!

Appreciatively,
Adam

I may have survived Line-Con, but I didn’t quite manage a graceful re-entry into the routine of school following break. I appear to have contracted some sort of stomach flu, which struck Monday night while I was at work and continued to antagonize me on and off throughout the week. The major overhaul I was going to give kadamwhite.com is now on hold until I can get caught up in my coursework—teachers have been very understanding and accommodating thus far, but I don’t want to push my luck any further than I have to.

Despite illness, I did manage to make it to the screening of Aliens for my science fiction lit course. It was a helluva movie, I’m amazed I’d managed to get this far in life without ever seeing it before. It is a lot of fun for me to watch a film like that and suddenly recognize the influence it has had on other works I’ve enjoyed, everything from Starcraft and Halo to Cowboy Bebop… good times. If you are like I was and haven’t seen that film yet, please do yourself a favor and watch Aliens… the original Alien is fantastic too, but I feel Aliens is even more of a classic.

For anybody who was at Anime Boston this weekend, the “Line-Con” poster is available for download in pdf format! The images are borrowed from Portal, Final Fantasy: Crisis Core, Anime Boston’s mascots themselves, Garth Graham’s Comedity, and Chris Malone’s Blue and Blond:

In all seriousness though, Anime Boston this year ended up being some of the most fun I’ve ever had at cons… Connecticon still holds grand prize for sheer awesome, but the panel I gave at Anime Boston this year on Digital Anime was very well received and the average quality of the panelists, artists and screenings was as high as ever, despite some tremendous lines. Good times, in the end.

These are silly, but fun to come up with:
Maia Pinion

For anybody who’s interested, I now have a more formal portfolio website available at kadamwhite.com. Yeah, a little narcissistic, but it seems like everybody’s got personal pages in their own name these days and far be it from me to deny an overwhelming trend in my target industry!

There is also now a navigation bar link to the site

Dubbed “the new Katamari” by my housemates for its insane visual style, slightly psychotic gameplay and all-consuming soundtrack, Patapon is the main reason I won’t give my friend’s PSP back to him. Penny Arcade made a very good set of arguments against the game, and I agree with all of the points made in their newspost, but as Tycho blogged later on, “I had to play Patapon for quite awhile before I figured out why I didn’t like it, and then I had to be quite sure I didn’t, and then I had to play it some more for some reason I don’t entirely understand.” It’s that kind of game.

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