S E P T E M B E R 0 4
Nostalgia runs high as Dave remembers DAA television, Top Swaps and Yang Poppen. Mike's Biochemistry professor runs the class like Snape from the Harry Potter series. Dave finishes his fourth quarter at PC, including the 200-pound metal chair project.
Crayon Test Patterns
Like most kids growing up, Andrew and I had our own imaginary TV station. I made construction paper and magic marker TV guides modeled after the ones in the Washington Post, listing columns of several networks and their shows. There were a few okay channels like AJK (Adam, Justin & Kevin, in an attempt to turn our neighbors into primetime competitors), but DAA (David And Andrew) was the major network and had all the good shows like Lego. We would often refer to our TV Guide throughout the course of a day to determine what we could play at what time.
Lego was an unscripted masterpiece, especially when pirate Lego came out. We had huge epic battles that usually ended up with some character falling off the "waterfall" (bunkbed) in slow-motion. My favorite character was the aptly-named and oh-so-politically-correct Wheelchairy, a standard guy with a blue shirt who was missing legs. We eventually found some legs, but the name stuck. Crusade was a captain for the good guys, but the best character was a renegade pirate cook named Mate who fought with a shovel and spoke with an english accent. They even had a pet shark. I remember pretending we were making several Lego movies, including one where the origins of the characters were revealed (a magical explosion at a toy factory). There was also a lot of time-traveling due to our castle, town and space sets; Wheelchairy and the gang would often travel through space and time to help various characters in the extended Lego universe (I think Andrew's favorite character was an archer from the medieval times who left for pirate times). If I had to give credit to one toy for developing and challenging my imagination as a kid, it would unquestionably be Lego.
There were a few other shows I sort of remember. Hawk was about a detective who had a crime-fighting hawk at his side. DAA News was a recap of the day's events, like what we had for breakfast and what our stuffed animals were up to. Sometimes I got a little carried away and pretended that I was on television during school. In the second and third grade, I made construction paper microphones to bring on special occasions like field day or holiday parties. I interviewed my friends, gave updates on my work status and just said general announcements about everything happening around me. My friend Robert helped me put on a puppet show in second grade called What's Cooking?, a hilarious madcap romp featuring a chef and a fish who refused to be fried.
DAA TV faded off the air shortly thereafter, mainly because we never were able to complete a Mickey Mouse movie we were working on. For its four or five years of existence, however, it was always the best thing on.
Wednesday, September 29 at 2:39 PM
Virtual Reality, The Non-Nerdy Kind
To most of us, virtual reality seems distant and futuristic. It's a premise usually confined to sci-fi books and movies like Snow Crash and The Matrix. Maybe you heard about an arcade game ten years ago called Dactyl Nightmare, where players put on an enormous goofy helmet and try to shoot a polygon pterodactyl. And maybe a small few of you played Nintendo's Virtual Boy, an infamous bomb of a system that was really just a gimmicky 3D Game Boy. To some, the idea of virtual reality seems like a pathetic excuse to ignore reality. It's like hey computer nerds, real life isn't good enough for you? We see this public sentiment towards MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role playing games) like The Sims, where you control a digital character on a digital planet who interacts with thousands of other players all across the world. Crazier yet, games like Warcraft let you take the role of everything from demons to werewolves, entering a fantasy universe where clans form and fight in a virtual space. Again, the general public associates this sort of person as the epitome of a loser. Sure you might be Sh'Karli the Shadow Hunter in Warcraft, but you're still working the late shift at Best Buy. Some unfortunate kid was so attached to the virtual Everquest world that he committed suicide when a supposed friend turned out to be a traitor, "stealing" all of his virtual stuff.
Okay, so let's step back for a second and strip virtual reality of all the nerdy and negative stigmas it's become associated with. A fresh start. Now pretty much everyone has dreamed of flying at one point or another, but most of us lack jetpacks or wings. So what if we could create an experience that somehow tricks you into thinking you're flying through a mountain range? You effortlessly jump off a cliff, naturally soar up into the clouds, and feel a weightless sensation and wind resistance. Everything else in this environment is real except for your ability to defy gravity and breathing at a high altitude.
Is this experience feasible? Definitely. We've got incredibly realistic computer graphics now with decent physics - the main drawback today is the relatively slow speed at which they can be rendered. Sensations of wind, mist, temperature, sound and smell can all be manufactured by machines. The weightless feeling would have to be the result of a spinning mechanism or zero-gravity chamber, or some sort of suspended harness on a crane...that seems to be the major problem in this plan, but for the sake of argument let's say Andrew figured out how to do it. You would probably wear a pair of goggles that project a three-dimensional view of a pre-programmed world, which realistically and immediately correspond to the direction you're looking in. And there you go; you can fly. Sure there are kinks and flaws in the system, but it's plausible. What if a company offered this flight experience, not in a cramped arcade or on your computer screen, but in a massive soundstage? Even if they offered thirty minutes of flight for $300, it would be worth it if the experience was "realistic".
I started thinking about this while watching the last Harry Potter movie. There's an imaginative scene where Harry is riding on the back of Buckbeak (a winged creature called a hippogriff), who is flying over a lake. Harry stretches his arms out and closes his eyes, feeling completely free. It looked like a lot of fun to me, but it is obviously impossible in reality. Then I played Sarah's video game version of the movie at home, and there's a stage where you can do the same lake-skimming thing from the film. Sure it wasn't overly realistic, but it was still pretty fun controlling Buckbeak to get a running start and take off into the air, swooping under castle arches and over treetops. What if you could recreate that experience to become as real as possible? What if you could recreate Hogwarts, the castle where Harry goes to school, in virtual space? You could create a building of secret passageways and tunnels that wouldn't have to follow the normal rules of architecture. Taking it a step further, what if you could actually perform magic spells by yelling out a command, seeing their effects realistically rendered in this world?
This fascination with impossible dreams like flying is what prompted the initial idea of Cadence of Seasons, where you will take on the role of a bird and fly within the first scene. Technology allows us to create interactive experiences that can provide an escape from, or a mirror to, reality. My definition of virtual reality can be pretty low-tech too: a lot of modern restaurants use a flavoring called "liquid smoke" now that makes you think your food has been slow-cooked on a grill by giving it an artificial taste. It's only a slight misperception of what's real, but it affects a small part of your dining experience. So maybe we won't see something as complex as virtual reality flight in our lifetimes, but the barriers towards creating something like it are diminishing every day.
Monday, September 27 at 3:51 PM
Fine Art With Yang Poppen
Yang Yoko Poppen started her first day of middle school art class saying, "My name is Mrs. Poppen...first name not Mary." I had her for 7th and 8th grade art, with misadventures-a-plenty. We clogged the sinks with soap, constantly turned the room's thermostat setting to its polar opposite temperature, and turned in fake poorly-drawn homework assignments with other kids' names on them. But two stories rise above the pack: Bird Hats and The Pencil Sharpener Incident.
In what is probably the single weirdest art assignment ever conceived, Mrs. Poppen asked us to make hats shaped like birds. You brought in an old baseball hat, smothered it in Plaster of Paris and painted it with acrylics. Don and I were in separate classes at the time, but decided to make bird brothers: LoLo and Fro. Don's LoLo was a spotted white bird with brown curled horns, and my Fro was a blue bug-eyed bird with a huge vertical green afro. Don and I were on the same baseball team that spring, and ended up bringing our bird hats to the games as our "rally caps". Nothing is quite as intimidating as a kid in the dugout wearing a bird with an afro. We also wrote a truly horrible song about them as one of our first band recordings.
The Pencil Sharpener Incident was even more drawn out. Towards the end of our 8th grade year, Don stole Mrs. Poppen's generic metal pencil sharpener - I think Eugene or Jeff or some Okay Samurai asian friend was there too. So when we walked by her classroom the next year, we saw that Mrs. Poppen had a new sharpener BOLTED into the table. Fast-forward to our senior year. Don and I were at lunch and ran into Mrs. Poppen. I asked her if she remembered us.
"Yes, I remember you David, but this one I'm not too sure about," she said, motioning to Don.
"Oh you know him, that's Don." I answered. "He's the one that stole your pencil sharpener."
Mrs. Poppen immediately grabbed Don's arm. "IT WAS YOU!" she exclaimed, finally finding her culprit after four years. Don quickly broke free and booked out of there as fast as he could. She wasn't really too upset - the pencil sharpeners were covered by the school - but it was still a funny scene. In retrospect, Mrs. Poppen was an excellent art teacher that didn't deserve all the craziness we put her through. She singlehandedly taught me how to draw with shading from a light source, a technique I still use all the time today. Mike thinks that my TFA experience was karma catching up with me, and there may be some truth to that.
I went logo loco this weekend, knocking out eleven jobs for Arteis (that freelance logo community I recently joined). This round included a Bermudan salsa dance troupe, two churches and a ranch. Word of advice: if you ever start your own company, give it an interesting name...not something snooze-worthy like Consumer Software Technology System Solutions LLC or MyCarDiagnosisMD.com.
Sunday, September 26 at 10:08 AM
Top Swaps
If you were to step into our Virginia home's basement and somehow not get taunted into playing air hockey, you might notice a stack of baseball card boxes resting on a corner shelf. And emblazoned on the top of these boxes in striking red and teal magic marker is the beautiful Top Swaps logo.
Top Swaps wasn't our first business venture - that honor goes to a cartoon firework we made out of construction paper and yarn - but it was our first storefront. Andrew and I were always into baseball cards growing up, doing the whole Little League thing and getting packs at the concession stands. You couldn't beat the cards made by Topps, which included a brittle stick of heavily-sugared gum that was usually already broken into several pieces upon opening. Between the two of us and the donation of some older cards from a neighbor, we had the biggest collection in the neighborhood and quite possibly our whole elementary school. So it just made sense one summer to clean our room up and turn it into a baseball card store.
We organized all of our cards in these narrow shoebox-esque boxes, separated by teams. We took our favorite cards of our favorite players out and put them into plastic binder sleeves (I liked Dwight Gooden and Eric Davis; Andrew prophetically chose Barry Bonds). And for one day a week for about a month, we invited friends and neighbors over to trade and buy cards. I still remember making a special display for our claim to fame, a Bo Jackson rookie card, by scotch taping it (in a sleeve) to my dresser with a note saying "Yup, it's his rookie card!" Every kid had their favorite player and would trade for little else but that player's cards - or maybe someone good on that guy's team.
Top Swaps was pretty successful - I think we made a few quarters here and there, but more importantly we got some great trades out of it from the younger kids. I have no idea if those cards will be worth anything down the road since we collected in heyday of the late 80s, but it's a substantial collection nevertheless. The best trade I ever made was at school in 1990 for an Eric Davis card with T.J. Wilder. My Mom (the best Mom ever, as a matter of fact) baked World Series baseball cookies for our 5th grade class with the Reds and Athletics written in icing. To this day I have not tasted a better cookie in the world than Mom's special occasion school cookies. T.J. seemed to agree, and offered to give me any card that I wanted for two extra Oakland Athletics cookies. So I got an second-year Eric Davis card and T.J. got a sugar high; now that's a great trade.
Thursday, September 23 at 4:36 PM
Making Ebert Look Like A Slacker
Thanks to Zack Attack's DVD collection, in the past week have seen a lot of old-school movies for the first time. Here's what I thought: Big Fish (A), Boogie Nights (B+), Comedian (B), Donnie Darko (B), The Game (A), Gattaca (A), Goodfellas (A), Jackie Brown (C+), Kill Bill Volume II (A), Matchstick Men (B), Ocean's 11 (B+), Panic Room (B) and Unforgiven (B+). I still need to watch the Godfather trilogy at some point and see what this fuss about decapitated horses is about.
Well, it's been about a year since I moved down to Atlanta. I really love this city. Traffic is the only thing I hear friends complaining about, and it can definitely get congested, but it's never seemed too overwhelming to me (as compared to say the Beltway in DC). There is a lot to do in terms of clubs, bars, music, restaurants and art. And of course Portfolio Center is giving sliced bread a run for its money as the greatest thing ever. Apparently some of the samurai are planning a trip down here in early October, which will no doubt lead to reckless abandonment of the law and probably several pandas being freed from the Atlanta Zoo. Come next year, I'm not sure if I'll still be here - the quality of a sweet job is more important than location to me right now, and it might be fun to explore another city while I'm young. But for now, A-town is perfect.
And then there's Jojo, the latest teen pop princess that I hear everyday driving to and from work. The song was tolerable the first time, but the eleventy billionth is one too many. Poor Jojo. Out of all the stage names one could possibly pick, she went with Jojo, which is only two letters away from a friendly gorilla who knows sign language. And judging by her lyrics (you said that you would treat me right but you was just a waste of time) ol' Jojo's been missing a few English classes. But my all-time favorite lyric is boy you must have gone and bumped your head / because you left her number on your phone. You're THIRTEEN. Your boyfriend isn't cheating on you, he's preoccupied with trying to catch all the Pokemon. Dude should see a doctor about that head-bumping problem, though. I for one will be first in line for the next hit, Mrs. McKawski's Pre-Algebra Class is Hard!.
Wednesday, September 22 at 8:55 PM
The Audible Splicing of Jet Engines
Fourth Quarter Projects are up. This was a good quarter.
Thursday night's critiques were very disappointing...because they didn't happen. Due to extremely heavy rainfall and flooding from Hurricane Ivan, my critique was cancelled without any makeup date. Instead, I brought my work over, left it on a table and called it a night. Pretty anticlimactic and depressing, huh? But of course, the learning process behind making these pieces was more important than a formal presentation or grade. I guess I was just looking forward to the feedback. Eh, what can you do.
So what's in store for this two week break? A couple of freelance projects, watching as many movies as possible in Zack's massive DVD collection, writing more Cadence of Seasons, working at Imagine and painting some more crazy robots. Katie and I saw Garden State this weekend; I loved it. A little awkward in parts, but overall a great first effort by Zach Braff.
Hope you enjoy the projects.
Sunday, September 19 at 11:42 PM
Antigravity Stilettos
Here's the first of this quarter's completed projects, a short Pella logo reveal (Quicktime, 1.1 MB) for Intro to After Effects. I'll post movies or photos of the other finished pieces when they're completed later next week.
A festive Don Simpson gave me a call at 1:30 AM Saturday morning and left a message asking if I was in class.
Saturday, September 4 at 11:03 PM
Snape Loves Biochemistry
There is only one course that I have to take this semester to go along with the research I need to do. It's called Foundations of Biomedical Science, and it's a 12 credit hour course that's the hardest thing I've ever taken. There are six tests and three papers for the semester. It's team taught by different professors who specialize in different fields. The first segment is on biochemistry, and it's taught by Dr. Michael Cascio. He's a pretty interesting guy, and he likes to quote classic rock songs. But we learned a new facet of the man when a girl's cellphone rang in class and he yelled out, "Ten points from Gryfindor!" That's the extent of excitement in biochemisty...
at 12:25 PM
Garden State Was Sold Out
New month, new fake magazine cover - yeah, I've continued the robot series of paintings. Each one is an experimentation with new techniques, concepts, and materials: each painting must exponentially push the idea of cartoon robots further. My goal is to have 20-25 of them done by graduation, set up an online store through PayPal, and sell everything for charity. First, I'd feel guilty selling my experiments for profit, and second, I've wanted to launch some sort of Okay Samurai charity event for a few years now. And crap, if Mike is working on HIV vaccines, I gotta sell some robots to help cure cancer so I feel like my life has meaning.
On a completely unrelated note, I recently discovered the tangible awesomeness that is chalkboard spraypaint. It can turn ANYTHING into a chalkboard. I sprayed a section of my wall the other day, and now I have a makeshift message board. It would probably work well in a basement or garage, but you could also make a chalkboard fish tank, piano or toilet if you really wanted to. You can rock it at Home Depot or art stores like Sam Flax and Pearl. Speaking of Home Depot, the one I go to here in Atlanta is actually the first one ever created. It feels like a massive warehouse city inside, complete with a Fuddrucker's restaurant in the front and mazes of endless sky-high aisles. Visit me sometime and we'll take the grand tour.
Wednesday, September 1 at 7:15 PM
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