Oh jeez

[Junodog]

So it seems there's not much going on around here.  I guess that means it's time to post some fantastic details about my semi-interesting life.

I'll start with this.  That's right, I made a silly video as a response to a pretty famous guy on youtube.  Note the fantastic acting and that oh so stylish t-shirt.  And the fact that I forgot to boost the volume when making the video. *headdesk*
The other girl in the video is one of my good friends, and we did two acts in a variety show tonight.  We sang "I Won't Say (I'm in Love)" from the Disney Hercules movie, and we did a few of the bits from the video above.  After a bunch of professional singers and very talented young children.  Um, what else...  I got my special happy pills for the next month.  And I have a 5-page (or 3-page if the 3 pages are good quality) essay on extreme poverty due by Monday.  Good thing I've got the happy pills.

Discuss:
rehearsed improv (getting random things to work with, but having lots of time to come up with something)
6-year-olds who kick ass at violin playing
ADHD
poverty
bonus: talk about it as though it's all one subject.  Like...
If ADHD is resolved through activities like rehearsed improv, impoverished 6-year-olds can kick ass at violin playing.

So, is that interesting enough to get some life in here?  We shall see.

[Rob]

I totally didn't get this until I watched the other video and the guy explained the rules. I liked his "Nerdy Shirts", Zelda, Triforce Shirt. I thought your Questionable Content, Bearmonster shirt was a nice compliment to that. I think one of the other guys was wearing some Penny Arcade gear. I've got to get some shirts up on the site.

If you love writing papers are pretty easy. The toughest part for me was always getting myself to do it. The thrill of the crushing deadline is my best motivator. When I was in college I had a course called Seminar in Justice and Law Administration. The entire course was one thirty page research paper. I chose to write a paper on whether or not the United States should grant most favored nation trading status to China. The professor loved it because most of his students choose something off his approved "list" so he rarely sees papers on a subject he has already read about over and over.

When I started my research for the paper (weeks late much to the ire of my professor who didn't understand because I was so popular with the other JLA professors and he actually went to two of them who really liked me and asked them to talk to me about why I was so far behind... LOL... if he thought I was behind then he hadn't seen anything yet) I was staunchly against granting them MFN status. China with thier human rights violations and slave labor and communism and suppression of religion. I was agin' it as the old timers say.

But then I read some testimony before congress that changed my perspective completely. A dissident priest who had been jailed dozens of times for decades in China went before congress and asked them to grant MFN status to China. He was convinced that a capitalisticc influence from the west was the absolute best possible chance for real reform of the Chinese government. And the more I looked into it the more I agreed.

I ended up changing my mind completely and wrote the paper from the opposite point of view I had expected. That's some good educatin'.

I of course finished the paper a week late (which cost me one grade) and wrote the entire thing in one 24 hour marathon session and turned it in at 6 am on the day in which it would have been too late and I would have recieved a fail for the course.

I got a B. 

[Rob]

I had a speech course when I was younger and working on my A.S. that required some in class improv. It was nothing like the Acting class I took when I was doing my B.S. but I had more fun because of the loose structure.

One time we were required, with only twenty minutes prep time, to create an ad for a fictional product and then act it out in class with all members of our group contributing.

Now, I'm lousy with women. You can usually tell how much I like a woman by how quickly I offend her. But the ladies aren't dumb, they can tell who is doing well in a class and who isn't and I was kicking much ass in that speech class. I used to have to teach courses in the Army so getting up in front of a group of (mostly) nervous teenagers and twentysomethings was no big deal to me. Every speech I gave was more flamboyant and ridiculous than the last. I had costumes and props. Basically, I was rockin' the course.

So the three most attractive ladies in my course eschewed the metrosexuals, beefcakes and hunks hiding behind thier baseball caps and migrated over to my desk to ask me to be in thier group. I decided to accept thier offer and also decided that if they wanted to work with me they were gonna earn it.

Since I was easily 5-10 years older than everyone in my group I took charge and created a product and started writing ad copy and assigning roles right off the get go.

The product? The Mechanical, Invisible Dog (or MID for short). Serves as a protector, 100% reliable and always at your side though the public will not know it. I gathered up some quick props, a tape recorder, and a jacket and sunglasses and then went to work.

I had one girl read the ad copy in the beginning, the other girl played a jogger and the last girl did the final sum up and presentation. I played a drunk mugger bent on some sexual assault.

After the first girl did the opening I had the second girl pretend to jog and then I walked over to her, grabbed her and said "HEY BABY... HOW"S ABOUT A KISH?" in my best drunken slur. She pretended to activate the MID at which point I acted out getting attacked by an invisible dog.

It killed. The students in class were dying. The professor was wiping tears from his eyes.

Needless to say I got an A in the course. 

[Junodog]

Ha ha, I would have liked to see that.


The essay was an absolute pain in the ass to write, sadly enough.  I went to bed at 4 am after at least 6 hours of hardcore CSS coding and photoshopping for this beast and didn't get to sleep until sometime after 4:30 for some reason.  And then after a couple hours of re-hanging pictures and taking out a gigantic ant colony I spent about 7 hours trying to concentrate on that essay but getting distracted and not knowing how to word what I wanted to say and getting distracted again and so on.  But it's done.  And now I can get back to finishing that profile and the 500 other silly quests I have on that site.  And admiring my fantastic avatar.


Oh, yeah.

[Rob]

Sounds like a journey.

Your dog is looking into my soul in those pictures. Freaky.

Yes your avatar is very.... what is that? Chibi? I don't know enough about manga and anime I guess. He's anthro as well?

Sheesh. Talk about a mixed metaphor.

I enjoy some anime. I like Bleach (the dubbed version I know... herecy). I catch Full metal Alchemist sometimes although I'm not fascinated by it. I do watch a lot of anime movies. "Ghost in the Shell," "Akira," that sort of thing. I got into anime way back in 1990 when a friend loaned me the first four or five seasons of Robotech and I spent the entire weekend barricaded in the barracks, ordering pizza and devouring episodes as long as I could stay awake. Good stuff. 

We have some similar music tastes despite the (I'm guessing) 25 or so years difference in our ages. Glad to see someone in your generation appreciates words and music and not just heavy beats and some bad rhyming.

I see you like Harry Potter. I'm not as big a fan as I've been told I'm supposed to be. Meh.

When I was in my early teens (and reading way above my level) I read an incredible series by an author named Susan Cooper. I was heavy into all kinds of mythology then (mostly greek but I was intrueged by all of it) and "The Dark is Rising" series was an amazing mix of fantasy, horror and English (mostly focusing on Arthurian lore) and Welsh mythology. If you haven't read it I highly recommend the entire series.

The first book, "Over Sea, Under Stone" is about a modern day quest for the Holy Grail. It's a little slow because it's kind of a prologue to the rest of the series. It doesn't have much magic and the main characters are three normal kids. The series really takes off with a bang in the second book, "The Dark is Rising" which introduces Will Stanton, an eleven year old seventh son of a seventh son and the last of "The Old Ones" (think witches but also aliens and perhaps... in a way even gods).

It really is a great series. I think it's seven books long. I recommend all of them. In order.

[Junodog]

Yeah, the site's basic avatar-building system is that you get the body (the chibi-type body) and then you put whatever eyes, hair, clothing and accessories on it that you want as long as it's available through the site (and you need virtual money for it, which you can earn by doing almost anything on the site).  And they have almost EVERYTHING.  I threw the tail and the octopus in there just to keep things interesting.  I also like tails.

As for that gigantic list of my interests, a bunch of those are ones I'm not super-excited about but that I can stand repeating.  Harry Potter is one of those, I think.  I have a fair amount of respect for the series, though.  Especially since Twilight came out.  My list of books that I like is pretty short because I haven't read a lot of books lately and I couldn't remember all the ones I did read that I liked.

Fullmetal Alchemist has been one of my biggest interests in the past few years, but the original anime (they started a second one that's about 11 episodes in as of this week and Funimation, the company that licensed it, has official subbed episodes on its website four days after the episode airs which I find to be awesome), though I loved it at first, paled in comparison to the original manga, especially when I got to see how many plotholes there were.  And then there's the typical 'let's take each character's prominent traits and exaggerate them so much that it's the only trait they're capable of showing' thing that happens a lot with adaptations.  And the changes in the storyline that led in a completely different direction and could have been decent if they hadn't added annoying characters and generic plot twists and so on and so forth.  So you have a higher chance of being fascinated by the manga or the new anime.  This is also a very condensed version of the typical rant you would get from a fan of the manga, I could probably go on for hours but that wouldn't really be necessary.

Haven't watched Bleach at all.  I've read the first volume or so of the manga, never really got further than that.  I've been into anime since I was about 5, when my sister let me watch this awesome 6-episode series called Gunbuster and then she started collecting a bunch of different shows on DVD and I'd just watch whatever she had.  Her collection is GIGANTIC.  And now she's teaching preschoolers English in Japan.  Go figure.

For my music list, I basically went through my iTunes library and put up artists that I had more than 3 songs of.  If I played through my entire music library it would last for 4 days, 16 hours, 25 minutes and 29 seconds, although a bunch of songs are in there twice due to some technical difficulties.  My three siblings are all way older than me (6, 9, 10.5 years) so I ended up growing up with a lot of music from their, uh, time, I guess, which could sort of explain why I prefer older music, but then also I have a low tolerance for loud things.  I can put up with the popular stuff of my generation pretty well when it's not being blasted, at least.

And I have no idea why I'm still awake.  I'll check out Susan Cooper's series sometime, though.  They might actually have it at the library.  Or they might not.  It's a small-town library so it's hard to say.

[Rob]

A couple of the books in the series won Newberry and Caldicot awards so most libraries usually have the series. If not you can usually get copies of used books dirt cheap on Amazon. They are worth it.

[Junodog]

Then I'll have to get over to the library eventually.  It's only about four blocks away so I guess that could happen soon.

[Junodog]

More details about my not-so-interesting life:

We are having an art walk tomorrow at our gallery.  Yay art.

I can has drawing skillz?  As soon as the head is shaped correctly and the legs actually look normal then I might say yes.  The boy is a character from my first novel-length story.

Of course then it'll still require the basic 'cleaning up' stuff, like making the lines the same thickness, adding shadows and highlights, etc.



Juno cut her paw the other day.  She's been limping some but it's healing up pretty well.  Of course, she set back the healing process a bit when she decided to go digging for some creature she was basically guaranteed to never catch...

[Rob]

Nice!

[Junodog]

Thanks, although it's definitely not a finished product.  I just made the lower legs longer and it looks a lot better now.
I also love photoshop elements and the whole 'layers' concept.  Which I'm assuming is used in other programs as well but I have no idea because I only have photoshop.

So... how about that art stuff, eh?  I'm not much for painting or 3D stuff (mostly due to the difficulty of paying for materials and having a good place to put them), but I do like drawing and photography and computer graphics.  And then there's writing and film-making and acting and stuff.  Art is fun.

edit: Here's how it looks after a little bit of work:



Still not done, but at least the legs don't creep me out anymore.

Edit 2: Whoa, I just realized the forums here automatically resize images so they're not ginormous.  That's handy.

[Rob]

Lookin' good!

[Junodog]

That's always a good sign.

Art Walk's up and running, time to eat a dinner of cheese and crackers and salami and m&ms and not strawberries because I'm paranoid but maybe I'll change my mind.

[Rob]

Good Luck. I hope it goes well for you.

[Citi]

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand now I'm hungry.