Right In Two

It is, in fact, rather difficult to explain what it is I do at school.  Or more accurately, it is rather difficult to explain what it is I do without sounding like a jackass.  While other individuals my age pour over chemistry notes and write 12 page novellas on the nature of Schopenhauer, I am wrestling with polygons, keyframes, IK bone rigs, and mental ray rendering. 

So over the past year as I've been in verying stages of production on what is to be my senior thesis, I've had the difficult job of explaining that, yes, I am a 22 year old person working on an animation about monkeys and bananas.  All the while my classmates have toiled alongside me in somewhat lesser displays of foolishness, until today.  Today is April 19th, and today is when all projects are due.

I handed mine in at 2 pm this afternoon, at which point it was shown for a large audience for the first time.  9 months of pre-production work, 5 months of animation, and 2 months of post-production work all channeled into an economical minute and fifty seven seconds.  In the blink of an eye, there it was, there and gone on the big screen.  Two minutes and some laughs from the crowd later and the experience is over, a year of my life flies by in front of the audience.

It isn't much, but at least it's done.  Now it's time for something else.



P.S. We are also currently up to episode 8 of Action Figure Graveyard.  If you have not been keeping up now is the time to start.  We will be murdering those who do not.

The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack

Last Friday started uncharacteristically early, at 6:30 am, with the most unbelievable abdomenal pain in the world.  Last night's dinner had come to life, doubled in size, and was pushing on the walls of my stomach with all its might, trying to escape and hit the beaches of Cancun.  After class that day, Spring Break would officially begin, and millions of college students across the globe would be ingesting lethal amounts of alcohol, followed by hours of painful vomitting.  However, eager to turn common conceptions of this break on their heads, I went about things in reverse order.  I vomitted FIRST.

After an hour and a half of fighting the gag reflex I let go, and a 7 year regurgitation-free streak comes to an end as last night's Chinese food revisits my mouth on its way into the toilet.  Sweet relief follows and I collapse back into bed, only to wake up again at noon under similar circumstances as before.  Many hours, doses of Pepto, and another vomit later, I'm staggering through the streets of Manhattan to the train station.

After 3 trains, a car ride, and an hour-long delay, I'm back in Pennsylvania again.  I collapse into bed, and 12 hours of sleep later, I'm fit as a fiddle and ready to enjoy the week off.

Now hypothetically speaking, if you lived in the middle of fucking nowhere in the Pocono mountains on Tuesday night, it's possible you might have seen five people running quietly down the road at eleven o'clock, having ditched their car off the side of the road a few hundred feet back.  The moon obscured by leafless trees, these people might have run silently up a large hill past nearby houses to reach one of the many entrances to a six story, five-hundred room abandoned hotel.  Again, this is all hypothetical.

It's also possible that these five people spent the next half hour painstakingly prying open a window on the first floor before they managed to gain entrance to the ruined interior.  Furniture, trash, old electronics, and paperwork littered the inside, along with graffiti from past visitors.  This is all speculation, of course.  Hypothetically, this hotel might strongly remind one of The Shining, minus the blood-filled elevators, weird ghost twins, and hedge maze.  Other people might have had the same idea, as "Redrum" was painted on a few of the walls.  Or, ya know, it might have been, if this wasn't all theoretical.

What wasn't hypothetical was the Cheesesteak Triathalon that took place later in the week.  Eight heroic contestants were to travel to three exotic locales, and compete for gluttonous supremacy in three events: Speed, Biggest Bite, and Amount.  First was the Steak and Hoagie Factory, and I emerged from the field of battle victorious in the Speed event, having banished a cheesesteak to my stomach the fastest out of all contestants.  Next, we journeyed to Gaetano's in New Jersey, "The State That Cleanliness Forgot", where I fell to the might of Andre's massive mouth and tied for second in the Biggest Bite competition, with six bites.  Alas, by now everyone had pretty much packed their stomach and colons to the breaking point with beef and cheese, and we had to cancel the third event, wherein whoever could eat the most cheesesteaks would be deemed the victor.  Stuffed to the rafters and feeling sluggish and queasy, the only sensible thing left to do was play manhunt.

All this was a fine enough way to cap off my final spring break.

Gravity Bent Light

Apparently, webcomicker John Cambell started a small trend called "Hourly Comics" whereby people draw a small comic for every hour of the day, recording what's happening in their life in (almost) real time.  Not one to miss out on the trends of the internet, here we go.  This was actually last Friday.