{"id":1042,"date":"2011-09-30T00:48:12","date_gmt":"2011-09-30T04:48:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=1042"},"modified":"2011-09-30T00:48:12","modified_gmt":"2011-09-30T04:48:12","slug":"stuff-im-doing-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=1042","title":{"rendered":"Stuff I&#8217;m doing&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Been a busy week here.  Animation Mentor semester 5 started this week.  My mentor this semester is animator <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/name\/nm0413639\/\">Jay Jackson<\/a>, who has a very impressive 2D background.  I&#8217;m very excited!  Our assignment for the next few weeks will be to add facial animation to our last assignment from last semester, which I am both excited and nervous about&#8230; I&#8217;m afraid my work is going to stink.  But I&#8217;m new to this, so I forgive myself in advance.  Just as long as I don&#8217;t fail out!  Anyway, our assignment for this week, which I haven&#8217;t done yet, is to shoot video reference and draw sketches planning out our work.<\/p>\n<p>Novel-writing-wise, my novel is at around 29,000 words.  The three main characters are currently traveling through the sky in an airship headed towards the kingdom&#8217;s castle.  I am a few chapters away from the mid-point of the story, so my current guess is that the novel will end up being around 70,000 to 90,000 words total.  We&#8217;ll see.<\/p>\n<p>I also started writing some more music earlier this week.  Not sure what I&#8217;ll call the piece, but it&#8217;s almost finished.  Watch for it on YouTube this week or next week or the week after that&#8230; not sure when I&#8217;ll finish.  It&#8217;s pretty standard Hannifin work, but I&#8217;m quite pleased with it.  In fact, I&#8217;m tempted to offer myself much praise, but, being me, I&#8217;m quite biased towards myself, so I consider myself at an unfair advantage to receive such praise.<\/p>\n<p>TV-wise, if you care, I started watching <em>Person of Interest<\/em> (mostly because it was created by Jonathan Nolan).  I&#8217;m not exactly impressed, but it&#8217;s not horrible, so I&#8217;ll give it a chance; but if I get pressed for time as the Animation Mentor semester continues, it&#8217;ll probably be the first to go.  I also started watching <em>Terra Nova<\/em> as I enjoyed the sci-fi-ish previews for it, but the pilot for that show I also found to be rather unimpressive, and, at times, downright awful.  But it&#8217;s interesting enough that I&#8217;d like to see what the story will turn into.  <em>Fringe<\/em> returned on Friday, which was OK, but not nearly as good as last season&#8217;s start.  But the &#8220;Where is Peter Bishop?&#8221; story line should provide me with enough interest to continue watching.  The first half of last season was excellent, but I thought the last few shows that ended the season were quite weak, and the cartoony-CGI episode was one of the worst TV-watching experiences I&#8217;ve ever had.  I&#8217;d rather watch <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=31Z8gMyI0F4\">HR Pufnstuf<\/a> several hundred times than suffer through that episode again.  (OK, maybe I wouldn&#8217;t go that far&#8230;)  I&#8217;m looking forward to <em>House<\/em> starting on Monday.  So&#8230; four shows for me this season, plus I&#8217;m still slowly working through <em>Burn Notice<\/em> season 2 on DVD, which is a great show.  And <em>Shark Tank<\/em> will return for a season 3, but I&#8217;m not sure when.  And we might get a DVR sometime next week, so that will be nice, but I can&#8217;t complain too much if I miss something, since Animation Mentor must be the priority&#8230; not TV.<\/p>\n<p>Reading-wise, I&#8217;ve been enjoying Neal Stephenson&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0061977969\/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&#038;tag=wizardwalk-20&#038;linkCode=as2&#038;camp=217145&#038;creative=399373&#038;creativeASIN=0061977969\">Reamde: A Novel<\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=wizardwalk-20&#038;l=as2&#038;o=1&#038;a=0061977969&#038;camp=217145&#038;creative=399373\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" style=\"border:none !important; margin:0px !important;\" \/>.  Definitely more mainstream (so far) than <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/B005DI71QA\/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&#038;tag=wizardwalk-20&#038;linkCode=as2&#038;camp=217145&#038;creative=399373&#038;creativeASIN=B005DI71QA\">Anathem<\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=wizardwalk-20&#038;l=as2&#038;o=1&#038;a=B005DI71QA&#038;camp=217145&#038;creative=399373\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" style=\"border:none !important; margin:0px !important;\" \/> (the only other novel of his I&#8217;ve read so far), but still quite captivating.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, and in other news, I can now touch my nose with my tongue.  I couldn&#8217;t do that before.  Two decades of practice have finally paid off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Been a busy week here. Animation Mentor semester 5 started this week. My mentor this semester is animator Jay Jackson, who has a very impressive 2D background. I&#8217;m very excited! Our assignment for the next few weeks will be to add facial animation to our last assignment from last semester, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[23,69,4],"tags":[219,429,340,189,427,421,428],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7gI4B-gO","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1042"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1042\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}