just spent 5 days in cancun. could not possibly be more relaxed. here’s the daily schedule of events that sara and i followed:

• wake up in giant bed, shower in giant rainfall-type shower in giant luxury bathroom
• order breakfast from room service
• stake out giant thatched-roof umbrella on the beach, lie down in total shade
• meander out to giant pool and fountain, swim around aimlessly and enjoy the near-body-temperature water
• swim up to bar, order margaritas with lots of salt
• swim around drunk
• meander back to umbrella, read book, possibly with naps.
• swim out into ocean, ride the waves on inflatable raft
• order guacamole and chips in spanish from cute cancunian.
• meander to pool again, swim around some more.
• head back to room as sun sets, take another rainfall shower.
• meander down to beachhouse restaurant, order awesome tacos.
• head back to room, sit around in terrycloth robe, watch american movie with spanish subtitles, drink beer, fall asleep.
• lather, rinse, REPEAT AS NECESSARY.

yeah, there’s been a lull. i don’t post as often as i used to. mostly because i haven’t had anything to impart. that, and it’s been pretty busy here at work. i’m involved on the R&D team for the work we’re doing on an unnamed movie, and that’s taken up a LOT of my time. i’ve moved to a bigger and better office, though, and that’s nice. i likes a bigger space fo’ sho. the sad thing is that my MAME cabinet got the axe, and i had to take it home with me. on the downside, there’s a lot of people who played on it that are sad because now they’ve got to do something else on late nights or during lunch. it was a fun service to provide for people, and it wasn’t distracting (we had pretty strict rules about use in order to keep from bothering people nearby). on the upside, i have a nice MAME cabinet in my apartment now, that i can play on whenever the hell i feel like it. :)

also, i’ve been teaching myself some php and mysql, which has been challenging but very rewarding. it’s for my own project for myself and some friends, so it’s nothing huge, but it’s a good experiment. speaking of my friends, i’ve made a bunch of new ones. i’m going to be an enforcer for PAX’07 this coming august, and i’ve been chatting a lot with other enforcers, both new and veteran. they’re a great bunch of people, and i’m stoked about volunteering at yet another awesome convention.

i’ve still been drawing, but not as often. the drawing level has dropped since i’ve been involved in this more technical project, but once it’s done, i expect the pendulum to swing the other way again. i’ve read scott mccloud’s books and i bought myself a giant awesome volume of facial expressions (one of my weaknesses), and i’m excited about drawing more soon. maybe when i scan in some of this fun stuff i’ll share it up.

thanks for listening/reading.

i did not think that i could post from my cell phone, but it appears to be remarkably easy, thanks to the opera mobile browser. too bad that even with t9 typing, word entry is still painful and tedious. i guess i need a blackberry or something with a full keyboard.

well, mostly:

• BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
  • “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,” John Knoll, Hal Hickel, Charles Gibson and Allen Hall
  • “Poseidon,” Boyd Shermis, Kim Libreri, Chaz Jarrett and John Frazier
  • “Superman Returns,” Mark Stetson, Neil Corbould, Richard R. Hoover and Jon Thum

i thought that xmen would be in, but thought that poseidon might edge it out.  and it did!  very cool.

my life is full of fur. mostly canine. i’m currently combing wolf fur for a movie adaptation of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass”, a young adult novel that’s been a favorite of mine and sara’s for a while now. it’s fun, but sometimes when i’ve been staring at wolf butt for four hours straight, my brain starts to leak out my ears.

last night was a lot of fun… sara and i and some friends went to the academy voting session for the VFX bakeoff films last night. the 7 films that made the cut get presented… 5 minute intro, 15 minute reel, and 3 more minutes for closing comments and questions. this is the fourth year in a row that sara and i have gone, and the first year that we haven’t gone with our good friend jude, who is just a little too far away to attend with us. of the 7 films:

• “Casino Royaleâ€?
• “Eragonâ€?
• “Night at the Museumâ€?
• “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chestâ€?
• “Poseidonâ€?
• “Superman Returnsâ€?
• “X-Men The Last Standâ€?

i predict that Pirates will win, and the other two nominees will be Superman Returns and X-Men, though it’s possible that Poseidon could edge out X-Men. X-Men’s story was way stronger (no surprise there), but the fx shots in Poseidon were just awesome. i wish that Casino Royale would make the cut, but i think that the work that they did was too invisible for anyone to appreciate it enough. it would be nice if i was wrong. oh, and it was obvious even from the 15 minutes of dragon footage that was shown, that Eragon was a steaming pile.okay, back to work! the wolves are howling…

nuthin’ to see here, folks.  sara didn’t write nuthin’ and i didn’t draw nuthin’.  we did, however, manage to save a young girl’s life, twice.  turns out she was an unwitting victim of the man-made GUILT virus *gasp*!  after scrubbing up in post-op, we sat down and watched spiderman, something we hadn’t seen in at least a couple years.  wheee!
yes, we’re playing Trauma Center: Second Opinion on the Wii.  you should be, too!

i plan on (emphasis on ‘plan’) making a larger, more complex drawing over the weekend.  i hope.  wish me luck!

i’m posting from a netvibes blogging module. while that’s neato and everything, i’m not sure i see why this is so much more awesome than posting from my actual wordpress admin interface, which is the next tab over.

hmm. maybe i’m missing something.

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edit:  this post closed for comments, since the spammers seem to really like this one for some fucked up reason.

what a crazy holiday that was. lots of wii sports, lots of family and family dogs (yay!). not as much sketching as i had hoped for, but i’m happy with what i did accomplish. got a couple nice artbooks (frazetta and n.c. wyeth) for christmas, along with a big ol’ sketchpad which i’m happy to have. and man, did i clean up on dvd’s. sara and i keep a list of dvds that We Can’t Figure Out Why We Don’t Own Already, and we managed to cross many off of that list this season. in quick random order: spiderman, free enterprise, back to the future boxed set, labrynth, dark crystal, mirrormask, fast and furious 3: tokyo drift*, and done the impossible (the firefly fan documentary)! it’s nice to have these among our dvd collections, but man — now we’re hurtin’ for more shelf space (yet again).

*: because i have screen credits. and the chase scenes are cool. oh, and seeing the vfx work i did on the Mitsubishi Evolution in the main menu loop of the DVD was pretty sweet. :)

saw Night at the Museum with my family, which was really nice. it was actually quite the entertaining film, and as always, it’s a big ego boost to see my name up in the credits for the visual effects. i was going to take a picture with my cellphone, but mom jumped up out of her seat and starting whooping and hollering, so i missed the pic. but i appreciated the enthusiasm! even though i did a lot of work on the zebras, oryxes (orii?), the rhino, and a couple other animals, it’s still nice to see them on screen and have the illusion fool you, even if only for a little bit. now i just have to go see Charlotte’s Web with sara sometime this week before it goes off the big screen. it’s my first ’3d lead’ credit, and i aim to see it in the theatre!

vacation always ends, and it’s hard coming back to LA again when it means leaving my family behind. i always have such a good time hanging out with everyone, and there’s never enough time to do everything you want to. dad and i (well, mostly dad) made a sweet cutting board that’s on it’s way to us in the mail. you can see pics of it at mom and dad’s site: avant gourds. and mom and sara made some awesome pants. we’ll have some pics of them up soon, but we have to decompress from the holiday first.

So… at a small cafe in pacific heights today, sara and i saw mary mcdonnell having lunch. it was nice. i wanted so badly to be all fanboy, but i knew i’d just come across all weird. the friends we were with were all like “omigod it’s the president!”

(wow, this post is a lot longer than i had intended. i hope you enjoy it anyway.)

so kim and i and jared and kemer suffered an abortive attempt to snag a wii on saturday morning. as it turns out:

hot tip about ebgames getting wiis early != actual hot tip.

but sara got to play with the wii at friday’s holiday party (thanks, kurt!), and so around 9pm on saturday, we decided (after much debate about how we were definitely Not Too Old To Do This Kind Of Thing) to go crazy and camp out for a wii on sunday morning. we showed up at Toys’R'Expensive at about 10pm and got chased off by the security guard (long story). we went for coffee and donuts, sat in the car in the parking lot and watched DVDs until midnight, and then set up camp after the security guard left. we came prepared with many many layers of clothes, many many things to do, but we did not come prepared for idiots. we were first in line (a dubious honor), but the guy right behind us could NOT shut up, and the the word ‘confirmed’ must have been on the vocabulary list in his weekly ‘How To Talk Good’ class. 40 consoles were ‘confirmed’. his place in line was ‘confirmed’. his wife was #11 in line at target, that was also confirmed. i wanted to see if he could confirm my sleeping bag stuffed up his ass, but i was pretty cold at the time and needed the extra covering. his underdeveloped sense of humour (don’t ask for examples, as i can’t give them anymore — my ‘cringing’ muscles are now broken) and poor social skills just about sent sara and i over the edge. and his crazy wife, oh my god. this woman’s every other word was a conjugation of the term that denotes intercourse between two individuals. she was waiting in line just up the road at target, called him about every ten minutes to ask if they’d gotten vouchers yet. i shit you not. there’s more to that story, but you really just don’t want to know.

anyway.

so we sat in line, people trickled in to wait in small groups until about 3:30am, and then there were about 20 people. after that, people really started showing up, and the stupid level just continued to rise. jeff foxworthy’s mentally incapacitated and pulchritudinally challenged twin brother showed up, and demonstrated his lack of ability to go 10 minutes without a cigarette. he and confirmation guy became best buds, and they and about 5 other guys had the same conversation for the next five hours:

1. how many Wiis there were
2. the probability of getting a Wii tonight
3. boy, it was too bad they couldn’t go to work tomorrow because they’d be too busy playing with their Wiis, ha ha ha.
4. how many Wiis there were
5. when they would get their vouchers (6am).

lather, rinse, repeat until your ears bleed.

i managed to sleep from about 4-5 (yayy headphones), covered in lots of clothes and a sleeping bag. sara didn’t fare quite as well. we were both suffering from the aforementioned imbecilic auditory proximity, but i was better able to tune it out.

anyway, about 6am we got up and waited for the manager to come out and hand out vouchers. we should have just kept playing cards, because he didn’t come out until 7:30, but whatever. the time spent between 6am and 7:30 we mostly watched Captain Confirmation and his sidekicks race back and forth in front of the store windows, tracking every move the manager made to see if he was Actually Coming To The Door This Time. you know when you walk past someone’s house and they have a fence and a dog or two? and the dog keeps up with you as you go past, or if you turn around and go the other way? it was a lot like that, only with more drool.

we finally got our voucher, there were about 40 Wiis, maybe 60-70 people in line. when we actually got into the store (8am-ish, after some coffee and warming ourselves up at pavilions), everything went very smoothly. we got two more wiimotes and nunchucks for a total of three. behind the counter they had a literal PILE of extra Wiimotes and nunchucks, so if you guys have been looking for one, i would bet that they actually have a few left (you should probably call them first to make sure).

then we went home, hooked it up, and played until our elbows gave out. we went out to go see Agamemnon at 3pm with friends, and that’s when i was able to catch up on my sleep. idiots and their kin notwithstanding, it was fully worth the wait.

so yay! christmas wish fulfilled! i hope you all enjoyed my diatribe.