Cardio Mafia

Ellen Degeneres reminds me of a yuppie crack-ho. Yes, they exist in the starched corporate world, especially in HR Departments, and they all dance just like Ellen. I used to wonder who, or what, comprised her fan base. No longer.

I like to work out at the Y during the mid afternoon, when the Y is mostly populated with old folks and bored housewives sporting fancy facial bandages a few days past the last plastic adjustment. There's a line of television monitors in front of the cardio section, as is the case in many fine workout establishments. Because I always workout with my micro-fangled mp3 nano-player, lately rocking either early-80s Maiden or post-millenial doom metal, I never notice what the monitor in front of my cardio machine is playing until I'm a few minutes into my session...such is the power of rock.

Inevitably though, I'll glance up at the tele nearest my face and lo and behold, there's Ellen D., the most inexplicably famous person who's never guest-hosted a game show, dancing in front of a pack of broken souls on some studio side-lot near Universal Studios amusement park. Every time I see that crap I wanna go on a rampage-- and it's not like the police would fault me for it:

cop- "Oh damn, you mean to say you were hitting a 45-degree incline while Mastodon was blastin' and your visuals was nothin' but that no-talent yo-yo was dancin' like a yuppie crack-yo?"

me- "I couldn't make it stop."

cop- "You showed restraint, my man, just shooting out the monitors like that. I'd have blasted everyone in the room."

Not that I'd ever drag a weapon into the Y. It is, after all, a family establishment, and as the Bush administration is quick to remind us, nothing guarantees success like a strong family. Righto.

Of course I've tried changing the channel before hitting my favorite cardio machine, but that brought a howl of protest from a pack of plump matrons going slow-mo on the elliptical's behind me. Every monitor, every weekday, is pinned down on some damn soap opera, or Ellen, or Montel, or any one of a dozen loony touchy-feely talking heads or screwball judges all born from the horned head of Phil Donahue. Seven monitors, and not a one can I secure for a little Star Trek or Cops. Ever. Unless I get nasty I have to cope, and I'm not about to get nasty over this.

I understand why these folks need the escapism. The mid-afternoon cardio mafia, there's no other term for them, are on the machines when I arrive at the Y, and are on the machines after I've done my cardio, yoga, and weights some 90 minutes later. They spend 15 to 30 minutes on various machines, taking care to ensure a good line of sight to the monitors of course. They exercise at a pace that may invigorate the heart a shade more than crawling to the freezer for a pint of Chubby Hubby. Seriously, they all go really slow, adding wear and tear to these machines while sustaining an illusion that so much time spent, doing something on an exercise machine, will bring super fitness and happiness. If they're watching their stories from a cardio machine at the Y instead of the family room sofa then the guilt/self-loathing factor is reduced. For them at least. If it keeps them from jumping off the ledge, then why not? I need to be more charitable.

So in a few hours, I'll have to watch Ellen dance while Bruce Dickinson howls about the white man's mistreatment of the natives, and I'll be wondering if future scientists will look back at this period as a time when the evolutionary tree split humans into distinct sub-species. It happening, and when most agree it has happened, the gloves really come off.

- K

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22mar06

New Jack Animation

Been sparse on the site content lately. There are reasons and excuses for that. Of course there are. Whenever production takes a hit, the first impulse is to explain the thing away, actually doing something about it requires too much sweat and creativity.

To paraphrase blogging sage Greg Djerejian, when my worky-work stuff occupies 12 or more hours in any given day, this site, which does nothing to pay my bills, will suffer. Wish I had more time and more energy, and no need for sleep, but given that time per day is nearly static, and that I get older by the day, plus that I gave up illegal stimulants quite some time ago, I must ration my activities. It's important to take time out every day to play with the cat and LadyK, and hit the gym to burn off the previous night's dose of ice cream.

However, I'm not worried about this sack getting lost in the pantry, and neither should you. The bottleneck I'm in is temporary, and when I emerge from the other side, both this site and my finances will be vastly improved. Win-win baby.

See, about 40 hours or so into my 3rd long-playing 2D toon, I decided that redrawing or partially redrawing a character umpteen bazillions of times to capture one movement to another was going to stroke me out or send me into downtown Stow on a rampage of News-at-6 proportions. What's left of my violent side is critical to my creativity so I try to keep all that to myself. I needed a workflow enhancement solution so that I could, in the long term, work on the stuff that lets me eat well and make house payments while crafting interesting animation with ~10 hours a week of creation time. There are several solutions for this. Maya and ToonBoom impressed me the most, and I've elected to go with Maya.

Most folks who know about Maya think of it as a 3D studio solution, and it is that in spades, but you can create a 2D appearance in Maya as well by using matte shaders. Thus you can move your characters along a path and turn the character and not have to re-draw the damn thing. You need but one set of walk cycles and facial expressions for a scene. The capabilities of Maya are staggering, but as with anything this cool, there is a substantial learning curve. The program is described, at its simplest, as 'nodes and attributes that are connected.' At it's most basic level, Maya let's you create and dictate the relationships between 2 or 2 million objects. At its most advanced, meaning at the end of a pipeline, Maya has the mojo to allow an inspired artist to create something akin to Chicken Little from the desktop. Pretty damn cool.

I'm prolly a few months away from creating the kind of content I envision with Maya and other 3rd party apps, but once it gets going the workflow will be smooth, and time spent will most importantly be time well spent. The toon I was working on, the one that started me down this goofy and labor-intensive path, featured several characters doing complex things, alternated between Earth and a low-orbiting alien ship and teleportation shots, and well, Flash and ToonBoom only goes so far with these kind of things.

- k

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7mar06

Schedules and Smoke

Not long ago I read an article in the Washington Post about Condi Rice's fitness routine. Apparently she works out almost every day, like our Dubbya, and obviously she looks very fit, actually, svelte. But not sexy, per se. Rice's routine begins shortly after 4:30am, which must work for her, but it's something I can barely fathom. I wake ~6:30 in the mornings, because I have to, but I do not consider myself a morning person. That may have to change.

If, because of work commitments, I have to hit the gym in the evening, I'll be surrounded by folks who are not at all happy, and who spend far too much time on the machines I wish to use. There is a grey-bearded American Graffiti aficionado with a greased ducktail who smokes a Winston outside next to his rickety Corvette before and after his workout, which is fine, but lack of breath from his habits keeps him on various weight stations for 30 minutes a pop, and it's not like this cat is a whirl of activity. Two, maybe, three spastic and undisciplined sets is all you'd see, sandwiched around 15-minute rest periods.

me: excuse me, are you using that machine?
old american graffiti guy: what does it look like?
me: that you like to sit on your old ass and stink the place up with stale cigarette smoke.
o.a.g.g: i'll be done when i'm done
me: okay then. watch your back

I'm not bitter. I've only encountered this sour asshole a couple times because I've typically been able to work out in the early afternoon, among a more workmanlike collection of octogenarians and desperate housewives. Looks like this carefree era is coming to a close.

Been doing contracting and consulting stuff for a bit now but I've since realized that I miss the office environment, so I'm jumping back into the corporate world. It'll surely be a boon for my wallet and a test for my soul, but diversity is important, and I'm one of those guys who actually misses the cubicles and florescent lights and mindless HR sensitivity programs and insane mailroom staff if I don't get regular dosages, and looking at my calendar, it's been 18 months since I've had to chair a meeting among people made to dress like the cast of Office Space.

Look's like I'll be getting back to that soon enough. All the positions I'm interviewing for this week have titles that include some combination of multimedia, developer, manager, marketing, and web. Whatever I land, it's going to chew up a fantastic amount of time, the first stretch of any new and worthwhile job almost always means a slew of 12-hour days until said plebe, in this case, me, is up to speed with the particulars of the position. Maybe I should just go ahead and work a tollbooth on the turnpike. I could develop a killer smack habit and bum change off drivers. Good times.

So, there will be jobby job stuff, part-time consulting stuff, animation stuff, spend time with LadyK and family and friends stuff, and then I'm supposed to drag my ass into the Y in the evening. Hmmm. The question becomes, for me, one of can I drag my ass out of bed at 4:30am and get a workout and an hour of writing/animation in every day before work on the weekdays...leaving the evenings relatively free. It's going to be, ah, interesting.

It may even provide a lift for this here blog, because I'm not going to have time to ponder what I'm going to say, but just a 20-30 minute window here and there to spew like a severed artery-- and no, I'm not sure why that was the first analogy to enter my mind...yes I do, LadyK and I watched Saw II a couple days back, and there were severed arteries for days. Not nearly as good as the first Saw, but still rent-worthy...and that's about all I got to say about that.

- k

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