notes from underground

One of the techhouse events I’m helping run during recruiting month is an all-day animation marathon. I was going to split it up as best I can between anime, 3d animation, flash, internet shorts, all kinds of stuff…. I have a huge amount of anime, naturally, and while I do not currently have much 3d or claymation I am hoping to use some of my christmas certificates to pick up some DVDs I’d wanted to get, so I hope to have at least a critical mass of both claymation and computer animation.

I was hoping that anyone who knows good online animations could reply to this and let me know… I’ve found a number of newgrounds flash animations, and one or two notable internet gimmicks from other sites, but anything people think is funny, important or just awesome, i’d appreciate it if people let me know where to find it. Downloadable is a plus, as I’d like to run the marathon with as little web surfing as possible between shorts.

Once again, in shorter form, this is a REQUEST FOR ANIMATIONS
If anybody knows any good Flash, 3D, Computer or ANY kind of animation that is available online, or for download, please let me know!

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it, and happy feelings to those who don’t as well!

I was up at the ungodly hour of 6:40 AM, thanks to the commotion caused by Gryphon discovering a stocking full of dog treats in the living room. Bad dog… Clever dog, but bad dog. It was the first Christmas in memory where everybody was up by 7am, but we made the most of it by opening stockings right away and opening everything else by 9:30, thus cleverly maximizing our time to enjoy new acquisitions ^_^

Best christmas presents ever: Complete Calvin and Hobbes on one side (presuming I can lug it back to college, it’s HUGE!) and Virtual DJ Pro on the other… every feature I’d ever wished VDJ included, VDJ Pro does. Adam is a happy, happy music freak!

I got Kip the PS2 game Shadow of the Colossus, and despite having a glitchy controller he’s been enjoying it muchly. I feel successful in my gift-giving, moreso because Mom and I gave each other the same book - John Hodgman’s book The Areas of My Expertise, featuring a list of 700 hobo names available on mp3. It is glorious.

In summation, Merry Christmas, and w00t for loot!

The author wishes it to be known that, yes, he is kicking himself for that last line. Sorry. ^_^

One last final paper later, and I’m done. It feels… wonderful.

Starting on Friday I ended up on a vaguely nocturnal schedule, ending up at Louie’s around 6 or 7 both Saturday and Sunday. There’s something very satisfying about eating a really good bacon cheeseburger with a coke at 6am… Louie’s is great, I love the low prices and the people that work there are really friendly most of the time. It reminds me a little of Sonny’s, a breakfast restaurant in North Carolina with a similar community atmosphere (Robby, the guy who runs Sonny’s, knows our family even though we’re only there once in a blue moon); however, Louie’s has that college-town atmosphere that is so unique. We went in at 6am on a saturday, with finals looming… not only did I run into four or five people I knew, but the place was PACKED!

I did not take full advantage of my sleep schedule, I’m afraid. Where I probably should have spent the long hours with few distractions churning out my paper, I split them up between research and writing and less academic things like RF Online. Saturday was weird too, because Techhouse was going to have a dance party, which means I always end up being less productive than I’d like while I mess with music and try to figure out a playlist. The party itself was really, really fun, despite a major technical issue: the speakers stopped working around midnight, about halfway through the stuff I’d wanted to play. Grr, but now I have an even stronger case to support my big-speaker budget proposal next spring.

I left town tuesday, after marathoning my Philosophy paper Sunday night/Monday morning. On Monday I crashed around 11:15, after handing in my paper, then woke up when Dee came by around 6:45. I’d planned to go to a movie with Dan Byers and Dan Erickson, but I slept through it… when Dee came by I finally dragged myself out of bed and went to Jo’s, then made a Ratty run to snag a to-go box stuffed to the brim with mozarella cheese. One visit to the minimart later, and the nacho party was ready!

Albert and Katie came by for said nacho party during a break in their crazy 6-hour Genetics study session, then went back to the sci-li. I hung out around techhouse and once more failed to sleep, as I ended up staying up all night packing and talking to people. Oh well. My flight was around 4pm, so I got to say goodbye to Katie after her exam, and give her the presents I’d gotten her. Much fun! She got me an Edward Gorey wall calendar, it’s amazing.

I’m down here in North Carolina now, staying at our house in the mountains until the 30th. It feels wonderful to relax for once… I’ll plan for next semester to have a lighter course load, I think, or I will go insane!

Japanese lit final went OK, I guess… some out-of-the-blue questions, general consensus in the class is “meh.” At least I stayed awake, working on an hour and a half of sleep as I was… woo coffee!

I spent most of the afternoon relaxing. I got back, ran into Lincoln, Haynes, Lucia, and a bunch of other Techhousers hanging out in Haynes’ and Lincoln’s room, celebrating the construction of their Kotatsu. [A kotatsu is a brilliant thing, a kind of low table with a blanket hanging down to the floor like a skirt around it and a low-power heater inside. Kind of a legwarmer crossbred with a living room table. They’re glorious, and it’s become a major social focal point in the house since Lincoln and Haynes built theirs.] I spent most of the afternoon hanging out in their room with people, sometimes sitting at the kotatsu, sometimes just lying on the carpet, savoring the feeling of having nothing pressing to do ^_^

I finally went to bed around 10, after more lazing about in the afternoon. This morning (we’re still talking Thursday, despite when I’m posting) I crawled out of bed around 11:30, woke up, got dressed, showered, did that kind of relaxing morning ritual stuff I hadn’t thought about for a week or so (well, even in the heat of the project I had at least showered). I will confess that, rather than read Nietzsche and draft my Will to Power essay, I played Soul Calibur III for the first three hours of consciousness. I went to the post office on my way to the Animation Screening for 125, no new mail but I did run into Alden, a friend from Japanese last year.

The animation screening was AWESOME! We packed the room, and people really liked both my Katamari animation and the full 3d Maya animation we did. I’ll post a low-res version of the Maya one soon, I just need to get around to converting the files… suffice it to say that I am very, very happy with how it was received!

I’d arranged with Dee to go down to the mall after the showing, so after a few minutes of congratulations and shmoozing I found her and Weihsin and we headed out. We walked partway with Dan Byers, who was STILL up, having not slept in four days… after he finished the sound for our project, he went straight back to editing his film class project. You’re declared legally insane after 3, and when Jane from Techhouse pointed out to him that people start hallucinating, he said “Oh yeah, that’s been happening….”

From anybody else, I’d assume they’d actually slept a little. Dan? Yeah, he’s been up the whole time.

The trip to the mall was really fun. I got to talk to Weihsin a lot, which I’ve never really done, however often he’s around Techhouse or Anime club. He and Dee are a really cute couple, and it was awesome getting to talk to them both, I don’t see Dee nearly enough either. I even managed to buy most of the christmas presents I needed to shop for, so a very successful trip all around!

After I got back I had every intention of studying. I really did, the books are still in my bag. Funny how studying got sidetracked… I should just avoid Haynes’ room, it NEVER turns out well for productivity. Today’s activity appeared to be the public beta of a new MMORPG, called RF Online (for rising force, or something, i dunno). The Phillipino beta is out, the American one won’t be out for a while, but through skillful clock adjustment and use of proxies they’d managed to fool the computer into thinking they were in Vietnam. I love techhouse… Lincoln, Haynes, Graham, Lucia and Joey were all in on it, although Doug declared it an unworthy game and seems to have abandoned it. I don’t know, I like it… yes, they roped me in. I got back and looked at the clock… it’s now 5:19, I had NO idea it was after 4, but I’d been playing for almost five hours when it crashed… yay beta versions?

If anybody else wants to get the phillipino beta going, my character is named Alarin, on the server Nexus. I’m a specialist, which means some day I will get a Mech, but in the meantime I am having much fun switching off between twin swords, a lazer gun and a compound bow. The technology level is weird, the monsters are odd, I don’t get the pvp stuff that happens after level 30, but I’m quite enjoying myself now ^_^

That being said, it’s 5:21 am. I’m going to bed.

We finished our final render at about 9:45, putting us 2nd in order of hand-ins and one of only two groups to beat the official deadline. w00t! Dan Byers has been in the art building media lab all day, re-doing the sound effects; the current soundtrack that we turned in was OK, but really not that special, and didn’t incorporate our frenetic recording session last night. Dan, Alice and I all piled into the Techhouse work room, and spent a good half-hour banging shit around, making metal clanking noises, me and Dan yelling at each other and screaming into the camera to create battle sounds, and culminating in my drop-kicking a threaded metal rod all the way down the basement hallway, into a wall. It made a GLORIOUS sound!

I’m back in the MSLab for now, which is kind of ironic given that we’re technically done… after this year I don’t know how much I ever want to see this room again, I’ve spent more time in the lab over the past few days than doing anything else, including sleep. I’ll escape around 3:15, I think but in the meantime I’m waiting for Dan to turn in his final sound file and studying Japanese poetry.

Professor Viswanathan’s Japanese Lit course is tomorrow morning at 9am. We get extra credit tomorrow if we know a hokku (what later became “haiku“; originally, hokku were the first verses in renga, or linked verse, and the only stanza that could stand on its own.) I memorized a hokku by Matsuo Basho (who else, honestly ^_^), written in 1689.

Ah, such stillness:
that the very rocks are pierced
      by the cicada’s drone!

shizukasa ya / iwa ni shimiiru / semi no koe

This winter, if I find myself with too much free time, I think I should register with Wikipedia and rewrite some of their articles on Japanese poetry. Most of the definitions are woefully incomplete.
I really wish I remembered the Tale of the Heike better… I read all but the last 100 pages, but those are a pretty significant 100 pages. I’ll hit them up over break, but das intahrweb doesn’t have a proper summary of the actions of the last third of the book, so i suppose I’ll go to Barus and Holley early to try and discuss it with a classmate. I think I’ll be better off than most on the essay question, though… she’s planning to give us webs of quotations and make us link them together through common themes. I like that stuff. Really, as long as this exam is better than my Japanese Language final earlier today, I’ll be good… that was death.

I’ll post a few sample clips from the animation up on Thursday, after the official debut showing in Lubrano at 4pm. In the meantime, SO relieved to get it done with! Just this literature exam and a philosophy paper between me and home. It’s a wonderful feeling

The leave a comment links were not working; now they are. This is a pretty cool backend, I just don’t know all the tricks yet.

The fun part will be this winter, when I can actually get around to theming this thing!

Well, snow and rain. And hail. With some wind, and ice, and…. eugh. Woke up this morning and it was a nice snow, fairly steady, fairly thick; began to cover the ground pretty quickly, I thought it’d be nice and white when I got outside. I made the mistake of looking away from the window for the next hour, while I studied for a Japanese presentation with Jane. When we left for class, it was a torrential DOWNPOUR of freezing rain. Not. Happy.

It wasn’t that bad, because Japanese happened to be right across the street. I really hope they keep it there, it’s such a nice location on those mornings when I wake up late… Presentation went OK, then we both ran back across Thayer to…

what the hell, my music stopped…

…ok, fixed it. Back to Techhouse, and warmth. I’m thinking we’ll try to have a fire tomorrow, at the End of the Year Dinner. Spent a little while hanging out with Jim and Doug. They were watching an anime called Tsukiyomi Moon Phase, so after I dropped off my coat I came down to watch the end of the episode. I’d seen Nanamimi Mode before, but I’d never seen the original nanamimi mode, the opening sequence from Tsukiyomi. It’s nuts.

Better yet, while looking for that flash animation’s URL, I found THIS:
NANA DANCE!

By the time we went for dinner it had cleared… it’s beautiful now, the snow’s all shiny and pretty. Well, I use “now” loosely, right now it’s dark outside and clouding over again. Owen, Ali and I had a snowball fight, and there was much Ratty food. Came to the CIT afterwards, now I’m working on animation, or should be. With that, back to work.

Shot 18, involving our White Knight hero realizing that he cannot, in fact, get through the metal detector with a sword. It’s not a high-quality render; in fact, the knight appears as black. This is not good, but the timing is correct and aside from a small camera movement, it’s all happy motion-wise, which is my job anyway. The file’s linked here:
Shot 18, No Textures, Low Res Render
It’s a quicktime file, MPEG-4 codec. It’s under 4 meg, so it should be pretty easy to download.

I’m pretty happy with the animation, but it took longer than I’d expected, so tonight’s going to be hell.

Current ratio: 7 hours of animation time to four seconds of footage. w00t.

The project we’re working on for our final is a comedy piece dealing with a knight in armor, who has to find some way to get through security. I’m responsible for animating the sections where the knight, realizing that he carries a sword and is made of METAL, takes himself apart and puts his sword and the armor through security.

Worked last night on the first part of that shot, where he backs up from security before deciding to put down his sword. Spent four hours on it, got it looking OK, then it got messed up… spent another three this morning, still a little jerky and maybe even slow, but it’s there. Take a look if you’re interested.

I’ve uploaded both the original animation of my first try at the clip, and the more successfully animated version (with more fluid movement). Hope they work, they’re in quicktime format:
Good animation, bad texturing
Bad animation, good texturing

I shouldn’t even be online right now… my current project is a 10-page final paper on Banana Yoshimoto’s short[ish] story “Kitchin.” All the same, here I am, messing with blogging software. I’ve been meaning to start a new blog for a while, actually… LJ just doesn’t cut it, and I ran across wordpress at karinko.net (the site of a girl I met at the Gate a while back.) Now it’s up and running, just in time to procrastinate on finals!

I don’t really know how this system works yet, but I’ll explore it this weekend. It seems like it might even have automatically generated rss feeds, which would be happy.

Anyway, much customization to be done, but first, the unlikely connections between Shojo popular literature of the 1990s and traditional tanka verse of the Heian era!! (Hint: it involves nature)

Please, leave comments regarding theme, I’ve got a bunch to choose from and haven’t decided yet.