Clean Lines, No Capes

Well I didn’t! Been a bit crazy. Ronan is sick. Seems between me, Heather, Jack, and Ronan, there hasn’t been a week where we’re all healthy since we moved to Texas. Heather says that maybe Texas just doesn’t agree with us. I’m starting to wonder if she’s right. Naaaahhhhh…it’s all gonna pass, and we’ll all be healthy again soon. Right? RIGHT?

So anyway, I’m staying home tomorrow to watch Ronan. Heather has been home from work almost every day this week. She’s been a real champ – watching both boys as they’ve been sick and such. Tomorrow it’s my turn for once. Which is good – my shots at work are both being sent to the client, so my being out tomorrow shouldn’t throw the schedule off too much.

So after I wrote my post last night, I realized it was exactly one year ago that I had written a post about coming home from New York and my time at Blue Sky. In the whole intervening year, I found time to post just a few links to some stuff I found amusing and/or funny.

So as part of my attempt to keep this thing a little more up-to-date, I went ahead and installed 2 mobile plugins for Wordpress. One formats this blog for any mobile device so that it can be read anywhere, and the other allows me to post from my mobile. So hopefully I’ll post some more interesting stuff from time to time and keep this thing up to date.

As for what has happened in the last year? Well I got home from Blue Sky and started at Sony Computer Entertainment in San Diego. We worked on Uncharted 2 cinematics until sometime around September I think. It was a very fun job – definitely the most fun I’ve had as an animator. The group was small and pretty tight-knit, so we all knew each other really well and had a lot of fun. And when crunch kicked into high gear, we were all able to keep each other sane (well, relatively – what I’d call sane, most people would call loony…but I digress). After Uncharted 2, we moved on to Mod Nation Racers. Once that wrapped in November, my time at SCEA came to a close.

We had a great Christmas, and afterwards, we went to Belize with my parents and my brother and his wife. Good times!

Last, but certainly not least, I was hired on at Reel FX! So we packed up the house and the kids (not in the same moving truck) moved on down to Dallas.

Pure genius

This is too good not to post. If you don’t know what teabagging is, you can check the intertubes…but this whole video is full of awesome.

It’s been a long time since I posted. Basically Blue Sky was teh awesome, but it kept me insanely busy. I would wake up, get on the shuttle to the studio, work all day and into the night, then get on the shuttle back to the apartment and fall asleep. And then I’d wake up and do it all over again.

It was crazy, and cool, and I made some great friends. I didn’t want it to end, but at the same time, I did, because it meant I’d come back home to my family. And that was a good thing.

So anyway, I was catching up on my reading of the intertubes and came across this gem:

h/t Oliver Willis

They’re a bitch.

A really messed up situation in Oakland. Group of young men fighting on BART. BART officers break up the fight, take the men off the BART and begin handcuffing them. As one of them, Oscar Grant, is on the ground and being subdued by what looks like 3 officers, one of them gets up, draws his gun and shoots Oscar in the back – while he’s pinned down on the ground by the other officers! Oscar later dies.

Video shot on cell phones here

It’s not an easy thing to watch, knowing you’re seeing a young man about to be killed and then the shooting is actually captured on the phone video. You don’t see much other than the officer stand and draw his weapon. You can hear the shot and see the other officers who were subduing Oscar jump back.

I mean…it’s not clear whether Oscar was one of the men fighting or not. But even if he was, there was no need for this. The cops were on the scene in force. They had subdued and handcuffed many other young men already. Oscar appeared to be willing to cooperate (his hands are up in the air at one point before the cops get him face down). And then in an instant, his life is gone.

There’s something drastically wrong with that.

Ron Asheton, guitarist for The Stooges, dead at 60.

Bah.  I missed posting this final Santa pic.  Maybe it was because I wanted to block it from my mind.  I mean..this guy is freakin’ SCARY looking!  Seriously!  Look at him.  Serial Killer for sure.

1980.  At first glance, you wouldn’t think this Santa is such a bad guy, really.  But his friendly appearance hides a dark, dark secret.

That’s right, this “santa” is really an alien!  The lack of visible mouth is a dead giveaway.  That, and those eyes.  And, you know, the thing about an alien… he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes.

So yeah, sure, he looks all jolly and good.  But I know his secret.  It’s out now.  Alien Santa must be stopped!