Sunday 22 July 2012

Rango, Recurves and RUIN - The Movie


The word of the week is tangent.

July 16 - My Birthday Watch

Quiet birthdays are the norm now; no more parties, long nights staying out way too late swapping drinks with friends or howling at the moon. I never did the last bit, but for all the rest I think the time has passed. I don’t have a whole lot of people out here to go OUT with as it is, so maybe that’s for the best. I did go out to The Masters Lounge here at the Westin Bear Mountain for a Guinness and some nachos with my friend Kevin; the view was spectacular and the weather was perfect. Fred the Mosquito even showed up, making his rounds as the Island’s token Summer Mosquito; he didn’t stay long after I waved him away. All in all it was a lazy, relaxing birthday that I admit I did spend a few hours of writing a chapter( just this year, I swear! ).


Gifts are another birthday tradition that has also gone sliding into disuse: what do you get for someone who is reducing what they have every year because they don’t want to move it NEXT year? While I don’t have an answer for that, apart from perhaps updating my shop-once-in-a-decade wardrobe, I do like to pose a few ‘Neato!’ gift ideas to myself. Like the 7RON Watch. I don’t wear watches, not since the advent of cell phones anyway, but I’d make an exception in this case. Very. Very. Cool.

July 17 – Laptop vs. Tablet

For the last few weeks, I’ve been using both my ASUS TF101 tablet and a basic Win7 laptop to assist me in writing my novel. Displaying chapter information and backstory that I’ve written is critical to forming certain chapters cohesively and I’ve also wanted to see which of the two( laptop or tablet )would be better at the job. After 2 weeks, the answer is: neither.

The CQ62-ish laptop is crippled: it has only 2gigs ram, a single-core CPU and a pokey-slow hard drive, so it chugs trying to multitask - which the tablet excels at. However, the laptop DOES have a 15” screen compared to the tablet’s 10”, which makes reading reams of text much easier on the eyes at arm’s length. Surfing the internet is somewhat easier on the laptop, as I have access to all my bookmarks and many, MANY tabs for reference in Firefox. Not so on the ASUS tablet, which tends to see it’s browsers crash if I surf too quickly.

Which leads me to conclude that as with all tech, the inevitable thing is to spend a LOT more money to get a faster machine( laptop or tablet )that won’t have you gnashing your teeth waiting while you just try to get your work done. Spend less than $700 and you’re compromising your ability to work efficiently, where the laptop / tablet gets OUT of your way instead of blocking your creative flow. Might be worth it… once I find another $700 laying about. Christmas is coming, right?

July 18 - I may never fire a bow again?

While at my parent’s today, I realized I had overlooked two things on the wall when I moved a few months back: my sword and my bow. The sword was a birthday gift some twenty years ago, a simple Spanish knockoff meant only to look good on a wall – and it does. The bow however, is real: a lovely wooden recurve made by Browning that draws about 40 pounds, meant for target practice. I used to use it regularly for a few summers those same twenty years ago, when I practiced with a local archery group of the SCA. I was decent and scored well enough for my liking; I was a decent shot. And it was fun.


Looking at the bow today, I realized I hadn’t fired it in over a decade. It’s been kept unstrung, as it should, on my wall all these years, unused. The second thought that entered my head was that I may never fire it again due to the unknown damage to my arms still lingering from earlier this year.

That was a very sad thought.

July 19 - Chris Foss


Growing up in the seventies, I saw a lot of sci-fi art and none made a greater impression on me than the work of Chris Foss. His spaceships weren’t the gleaming cylinder-rockets of the Golden Age of sci-fi, nor were they the gritty-realistic grey boxes of Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica. No, the ships of Foss’s art pieces are of unusual shapes, with oddly defined details wherever you looked closely and coloured in the manner of tribal warpaint. They grabbed my imagination and shook it mightily to make stories and characters pop into my head with every picture: they were evocative and provocative and many other words that called creativity into being. Back then, it opened the doors in my mind to visualizing things as I wanted them to be, free of the constraints of following other well-worn paths. Today, seeing something so different tells me that there are LOTS of other ways of ‘defining’ sci-fi.

Thanks, Chis, for sharing your art with me. And the world.

July 20 - RUIN will become a movie!

Back in March of 2012, I wrote about a short CGI animated film I’d discovered called RUIN. Mix up flying killer robots, a motorcycle and nanotech in an apocalyptic world and you have a great 8-minute story. Good enough for someone to want to make a longer film, apparently! McG has purchasedthe film rights to RUIN and will be working with Wes Ball of Oddball Animation who created RUIN several years ago. If you haven’t seen it, have a look( and listen, the music is great! )again below:

RUIN from OddBall Animation on Vimeo.

July 21 - Rango

It was a slow Saturday today. I went over to the Moss St.Paint-In, which saw tens of thousands of people come out on a gorgeous sunny day to see hundreds of artists exhibiting their work all along the closed-off street near to where I live (and used to live on). I’m not much of an art expert, so I simply wandered and enjoyed the crowds enjoying the art, with the occasional piece catching my eye. If I’d had thousands of dollars in my pockets, I may have bought a piece or two for a few hundred… nothing really jumped out and spoke to my inner muse, though I didn’t manage to browse the whole 4km-long street.


After I managed to wrestle a migraine into submission, in the evening my family and I watched Rango, starring Johnny Depp. I thought it was a wonderful film that consistently( and intentionally )broke the Fourth Wall, which was awesome. The animation was breathtakingly detailed and there was SO MUCH to take in that I’ll have to watch it a second time… or a third. We rented the DVD( my first rental in a decade )from the local shop Pic-A-Flic, which stunned me with it’s variety and volume of choices! Dense racks of television, documentaries, movies and other media filled the place tight and the prices were right: Rango cost me a Toonie for two nights. I’ll be back again!

July 22 –What the blah?

Woof! Today went sideways somehow. My mom didn’t have a good night last night, so I stayed at my parent’s place all day today in case she needed someone nearby or had to go to the hospital – something we’re quite used to but I had hoped was going to happen less frequently in the future. As we were both rather tired, I decided to forgo resuming writing today and instead finished transferring my novel data so far into a program called Storybook. I added in chapters, scenes, characters and plot threads, which will allow me to visualize ALL aspects of the novel and see where I may be straying from a solid storyline or neglecting to mention an important character more than once. Right now the MOST important thing is to GET the chapters DONE though, so it’s going to be a solid slog for the next few weeks to lay down another dozen chapters for the next 1/3 of the book. Then I can spend a good few weeks wrapping up the final half-dozen chapters in a nice tight unit to complete the first draft by the end of August, I hope. The data entry and the blog took up the entirety of my day, along with periods of random unconsciousness. Blah.

It's been a three-day break from writing and I'm itching to get back to it this week, hopefully when my mom's feeling better. I'm also going to be putting some increased efforts into job-hunting, to try and find a better fir to my wants AND my needs. Knowing that I don't want to go backwards, I'll take going sideways for a bit job-wise if it means I can start to move forward by 2013. Yep!