Last night I sent out another small batch of query letters to producers regarding my screenplay The Melody Box, only this time I made mention of my small new site www.TheRealMelodyBox.com, showing off my attempt at programming a program that does what the melody box in the screenplay does: generates melodies. I’m hoping the potential software-movie tie-in will appeal to someone out there. It’s a bit of a long shot, but any attempt to break into the film business from the outside is probably a long shot. But it would probably be the most rewarding, I imagine. So we’ll see what happens. I hope to send out some more query letters over the weekend, and a friend suggested making a YouTube video with some of the melodies arranged into a more orchestrated piece, which I also hope to do over the weekend. Luck, be a lady…
Polls Websites
Homepage redesign
If you haven’t noticed yet, I’ve redesigned my main site. It is now extremely simple, mostly just a collection of links. That’s really the only purpose it was serving before, but it was much more cluttered and clunky, and the CMS I was using (called “Dragonfly”) was out-of-date and had some problems rejecting certain IPs and newer browsers. I did have some forums there which had about 35 members, but I doubt many will miss it; most people registered, posted a few questions to me, then left forever. In case any future visitors want to do the same, I created a new forum with phpBB, though until I become rich and famous, I know that it won’t get much traffic. Now I just need to recreate a “links” section for it…
What do you think of the WizardWalk.com redesign?
- I have never seen true beauty until this day (67%, 2 Votes)
- It's just OK, and I don't really care (33%, 1 Votes)
- It's pretty good, but not great (0%, 0 Votes)
- It's kinda lame (0%, 0 Votes)
- I have never felt so sick from just a website (0%, 0 Votes)
Total Voters: 3
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Freedom to Learn by Peter Gray
I recently came across this blog: Freedom to Learn by Peter Gray.
There are a bunch of interesting articles there, and I haven’t read them all. But I really appreciate some of them; they echo what I’ve been saying all along, and it’s always nice to feed my confirmation bias.
In one article, Gray writes:
We can use all the euphemisms we want, but the literal truth is that schools, as they generally exist in the United States and other modern countries, are prisons. Human beings within a certain age range (most commonly 6 to 16) are required by law to spend a good portion of their time there, and while there they are told what they must do, and the orders are generally enforced. They have no or very little voice in forming the rules they must follow. A prison–according to the common, general definition–is any place of involuntary confinement and restriction of liberty.
I recently talked to a teacher who was complaining about the things the school system made teachers do, and I asked: “Then why do you do it?” The answer was something like: “For the hope it might get better.” I said: “That’s pathetic!” but at least it wasn’t some BS about how much the teacher loved kids and knowledge and making a difference, etc. Some teachers will make a huge point of their pure intentions, as if that somehow absolves them of any wrongdoing. The truth, however, is probably quite apparent to most of us, it’s just considered rude to talk about: most teachers became teachers because they didn’t know what else to do.
I can certainly sympathize with the plight of getting out of college and not finding any jobs available that I would actually want. But becoming a teacher, especially if you have serious disagreements about how the education institution does things, seems pretty dumb to me. What should you do instead? I must admit, I’m not sure; not going to college in the first place might help.
But don’t you think an excellent way to make our education systems change would be to help them experience a shortage of teachers? I can’t imagine you being able to change too much from the inside, after you join a labor union which doesn’t agree with your position.
In another post, Gray responds to Daniel T. Willingham’s book Why Don’t Students Like School?, a book I blogged a bit about on my Book Quotes blog. Gray writes:
Willingham’s thesis is that students don’t like school because their teachers don’t have a full understanding of certain cognitive principles and therefore don’t teach as well as they could. They don’t present material in ways that appeal best to students’ minds. Presumably, if teachers followed Willingham’s advice and used the latest information cognitive science has to offer about how the mind works, students would love school.
Talk about avoiding the elephant in the room!
Ask any schoolchild why they don’t like school and they’ll tell you. “School is prison.” They may not use those words, because they’re too polite, or maybe they’ve already been brainwashed to believe that school is for their own good and therefore it can’t be prison. But decipher their words and the translation generally is, “School is prison.”
See? I told you so.
OK, most of Gray’s articles are not about schools being prison, but he does bring up the notion of “freedom” a lot from a psychological point of view, from the idea that a sense of freedom is an innate psychological desire for all humans, including children. And it seems right to me; I certainly have a sense of freedom and hate having to do stuff I didn’t choose to do. In fact, (and I’ve said this before) I’d say the common reason parents and teenagers clash is because the teenager is psychologically ready and thirsty for more freedom, but parents and society don’t give it.
Websites
Accomplishing much?
Here’s a fun website: Things Other People Accomplished When They Were Your Age
It’s a great way to depress yourself by comparing yourself to other people! Perhaps not good for your mental health, but maybe you can stop being so self-conscious and find it funny… and be sure to also look back at what other people accomplished before they were your age, just to rub it in.
It looks like the site’s author is also accepting achievement submissions from the common man, so sprinkled in with the famous accomplishments of famous people are some accomplishments you probably don’t care about. I’m not sure what the point of that is; perhaps it’s an effort to pull you out of depression?
And you’ll see on that page there’s a link to Help for the Attitudinally Challenged, which might help if you now feel miserable.
Animation Websites
A few animation blogs…
There are, of course, a ton of animation blogs out there, but here are a few random ones I’ve been visiting recently:
Pencil Test Depot – This has a lot of great pencil tests, as the name might suggest. 2D animation, yes, but the principles of animation don’t change. Lots of great stuff there. I came across this blog some months ago before getting into Animation Mentor, but it came up again last night during my Animation Mentor Q&A and I was reminded of its goodness.
Blue Sky Disney – More of an entertainment business blog, but still lots of interesting animation news there.
The Pixar Blog – What Pixar fan hasn’t come across this blog? Dedicated to Pixar news, with a dash of its parent, Disney.
Good stuff.
Websites
Theme tweaking…
As you can see (if you’ve been to this blog before), I’ve tweaked the theme a bit, moving some things around, changing the font from Tahoma to Verdana, and widening the width. Hope you like it! If you don’t, well, too bad! Please let me know if something looks wrong in your browser. Seems to look fine in the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome.
That’s all. Bye.
Websites
Daily Science Fiction
Here’s an endorsement for a new science fiction site called Daily Science Fiction. I will admit I am a bit biased as my first short story sale was to them. If you go to the site, you can see that my story isn’t scheduled for this month. Next month maybe? Who knows… Anyway, they officially launched yesterday on September 1st, emailing subscribers the first story.
I don’t usually like reading on a computer screen, but these stories are quite short, so they only take 5 or so minutes to read, so the experience is quite fine. Also, the first two stories have been, I believe, quite good. If they keep up the quality (and the to-the-point shortness) I think this will be a really awesome source for a quick fiction fix.
To anybody out there who reads science fiction and fantasy, I highly recommend checking out the site and subscribing. (Should be great for ereaders.) This is also partly blatant self-promotion, so you’ll be ready to read my shorty short story when they publish it… but I really enjoyed the stories they sent out today and yesterday, so I’m looking forward to more!
Animation Fiction books Music Non-fiction books Websites
Animating and reading and music and stuff…
Animation studies continue
It’s now week 7 (of 72) of Animation Mentor! The first semester (of 12 weeks) is half way over!
Last week’s assignment involved animating a pendulum. Unfortunately, towards the end of the week (mostly Saturday and Sunday) I caught some sort of virus, so I lost a nice chunk of animation time, and my assignment turned out pretty “blagh.” I mean, it wasn’t completely terrible, but it needs lots of polishing, so I’ll post that up on YouTube after I do a revision. Feeling better now, so I hope this week will be better.
Reading…
I finished reading The Talent Code
Which kind of leads me to another problem… so often it seems that how “good” a school is is determined by comparing it to other schools. People say things like “this school scored in the 90th percentile!” That sounds pretty good, but it actually really doesn’t say that much. What exactly is the “score” of the 90th percentile? Shouldn’t the actual score matter? With this sort of comparison-rating system, a school (or a student) doesn’t even have to improve for their score to improve… everyone else just has to do worse.
Along the same lines (though this is a complete tangent from the subject of the book), I hate when teachers, both high school and college, grade to a curve. As if a bell curve should naturally arise in the grades, and if it’s not there, you just shape the test scores to it. It makes no sense; you can get a better grade simply because everyone else did lousy on the test? But really this is part of the bigger “grading problem” in general that schools have; they simply use grades in a completely wrong way, as a form to easily compare students and to act as an easy gatekeeper for decision making. Unfortunately how well someone knows facts or a skill is not so easily numbered. (And this is really related to the “school problem” in general; how so many people think it’s a good use of time and money to teach and learn things students are not interested in or are not going to use. I’ll spare myself from going off on that tangent today…)
One last thing I’m starting to understand, from this book and others with similar themes, is that our personalities, as defined by our decisions and interests, are, or at least can be, as malleable as our intellect. They are a product of our environment. Maybe not completely, of course, but the true (often subconscious) sources of interests and personalities are quite complex; they do not simply emerge from DNA. In other words, if you observe that someone is bossy when they are a baby, that’s not necessarily just because they have “bossy” genes. Although, maybe they do… my point is that it’s complex. And people can change, at least to a greater degree than they may realize. Not easily, perhaps. It might take a complete overturning of your environment, and the change might be from “stable” to “completely depressed and crazy”, but it’s possible. I do wish it were easy to understand how interests come about and how they could be changed, but they seem to get so set-in-stone that we think of them as being as unchangeable as stone…
The other book I finished reading was Federations
Will books die soon?
In other news, I read this article in which some guy says that physical books will be dead in 5 years. *gasp* Firstly, the article states that we must consider what has happened to music and films, which makes no sense to me. Those are digital art mediums in the first place. You watch a movie with a digital TV, and you listen to music on speakers (or headphones). Those have required electricity to perceive the art for a long time. Not so with books. So I don’t think the comparison is entirely valid. Also, movies are still quite non-digital, in that they still are sold on physical discs. This not only helps prevent copying (to a degree), but it also allows customers to trade, rent, borrow, return, and resell their movies. In a purely digital world, we can’t do that. Money would only ever flow one way. Great for movie distributors (if they can prevent illegal copying enough), somewhat lame for everyone else (unless you can get free movies by watching ads at certain intervals… but still no returning or trading).
He also says that the sales of Kindle books has outnumbered the sales of hardbacks. OK… that in and of itself is not really evidence of anything, as far as I can tell. We’d also have to see a decline in hardback sales, and look at paperback sales. And publishers would have to at some point conclude that publishing a hardback would not be worth it. And then conclude that paperbacks aren’t worth it either. These business decisions would, I think, be way too drastic for publishers to figure out in just 5 years. Unless, of course, Kindle and other ebooks take off so well and make publishers so rich that they have nothing to worry about by going all digital. So I guess I’d really have to look at the publishers’ records to know…
Eventually, books may very well die, or at least become mostly dead… but in just 5 years? I highly doubt it.
Some beautiful music!
Lastly, as a reward for reading all that blather (or for scrolling down), here’s some beautiful music for you!
Want more? Of course you do!
These pieces were brought to you by the Portsmouth Sinfonia which I came across last week (or yesterday or something)… what beautiful sounds!
Websites
Started an Android game review blog
In my continuous efforts to get my mind off of the manufacturing of my album, which makes me restless, I have started yet another blog (that I probably won’t keep updated for very long, because I have a habit of letting things die). The blog is creatively called “Android Games” and features reviews of games for the Google Android OS. And here is the blog.
OK, nothing too special, but should be fun to maintain for a few days at least.
I seem to find installing and setting up WordPress blogs to be a bit addicting… but maintaining them is another matter…
Movies Websites
Album’s site is up and Burton’s Alice review
I spent my day off work working. Enterprising, no? I created a small site for my vanity label Hannifin Records. Of course, there’s not much there yet. But you can see a bit more of my first album’s cover art revealed in the title banner. And, if you navigate your way through it a bit, there’s a page for the album with previews of all the tracks. Next I need to experiment with PayPal buttons, since I’m guessing that’s what I’ll use to take orders.
Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland review
Also, I just got home from watching Tim Burton’s version of Alice in Wonderland. Read no further if you plan on seeing the movie yourself and fear having your opinions tainted by my own.
Still reading? OK, well, that’s your own fault.
I liked some things, didn’t like others. Like most movies.
The artistry was great. Especially the architecture of the castles, in my opinion. Just awesome stuff, awesome to look at. I do wish I could live in castles so well designed. Though how do you get a laptop to go with the surroundings? The special effects were great; I look forward to seeing them on blu-ray eventually. (Our movie theaters here still don’t seem to like using digital projection or actually putting the picture in perfect focus.) The music was also very good. Danny Elfman’s music does tend to please me. I’ll probably buy the soundtrack. Good film music, especially compared to the more-atmospheric-less-melodic music films tend to be using nowadays. Why don’t they throw us a crumb? What’s wrong with letting us tap our toes a bit? I’ll let you know when Stravinski has a hit… oops, sorry. Helena B. Carter was also very funny.
The bad… just about everything else. Which I actually won’t blather about because, you know, I like to focus on the good. OK, actually I’m just lazy. But I do think I could’ve written a better script. If I didn’t have to base it on a book. I mean, with such awesome visual artistry, I think there are more interesting stories to be told. Why keep telling the same stories?
I did get a few ideas for novels and short stories while watching. And the ending kind of made me want to invent a bunch of chess variants.
That’s all I have to say. Guess what I get to do all weekend? Go to work! Yeah!!
Bye.