And... Finished! Huzzah!

So, having just complained that I am a flake that can't meet deadlines...

I've finished the Microeufs animation (Youtube viewing here ). I am awesome beyond compare, etc, etc, but I still have to go and sign on tomorrow and point out that the leaflet does actually say that volunteering is encouraged because it expands your CV.

Anyhoo, I'm going to make with the embedding (and quickly, because the internet will probably be turned off shortly):

Wahey, embedded!


It's simpler than the Merde song, also it's in English (by the way: Microeufs/Microeufs = Litigation avoiding term for the awesomeness that is Cadbury's Mini-eggs and also happens to fry my brain...)


That's all, folks!


Smivel.

Animation progress - with sneak preview/teaser

I don't work well with deadlines.


Not even self imposed ones.


I should have learnt this a while ago when working on the second in a (not really readable) sequence of books. I told the interested parties (although not very interested, as it turns out) that the second and final part would be done by march that year, because based on previous work and current rate of progress, that was when I expected to have it finished.

Six (or possibly seven) years later, I've lost interest, left it unfinished for two years, lost the file for another year and then found and deleted it. The awful first book remains the only one in its series, with no hope of being joined by any further drivel about angst, werewolves and space travel (I was a teenager. It happens to us all at some point).

The point is not the awful book. The point is deadline fail. .

When I finished animating the critically acclaimed (slight exaggeration for dramatic effect) foreign language short "That Merde Song" (here), which pokes fun at pop artists who sing in foreign languages by sounding like catchy eurotrash while being about a soiled bicyle, I assured the composer that I would have completed the animation for our second video within a couple of weeks.

This was not unrealistic. The second animation is infinitely simpler, consists of only three scenes and tends to have only one element moving at any given time (even if repeated). This is as opposed to the afore-mentioned That Merde Song, which consists of:

• A twenty second intro depicting two dung flies discoving that they were made for each other only to have their hearts broken, Joss Whedon style...
• A twenty-four frame loop and a six-frame loop playing at different speeds for the first two choruses, including sixteen frames where a character's mouth in synched to the music, and several overlaid frames of an asynchronous villain character.
• A first verse divided into three scenes: a) a Lowry-inspired computer-generated cityscape with two moving characters, one of which sings; b) a close up of said character singing and c) a fairly awesome black-and-white parody of Munch's "The Scream", with one character singing.
• A second verse divided into three completely different scenes: 1) two rabbits discussing the title theme; 2) A theologically interesting meme-duck and 3) a character singing while being complimented by an ASDF-inspired stereotyped frenchman (Eiffel Tower included) who then starts smoking before the entire landscape is covered in custard.
• A third chorus integrating the six-frame loop and an asynchronous villain character.
• A short scene on the birth of a burlesque sausage (No idea why...)
• A final chorus set to a Clint Eastwood-esque Wild West showdown between singer and villain, including close ups of two very disparate weapons firing...

Point is, it wasn't simple.
Hence the underlining.

The current project (well, the main current project) is a much simpler hybrid of an ASDF tribute and a campaign for year-long access to Easter-themed Cadbury's Projects. It really should have been doable within a day. If my computer wasn't full up of 60GB or thereabouts of photographs, not to mention hundreds of redundant Windows features and several independent programs.

Even without that, a week was pretty generous. And I finished the main animations within that period (roughly). But the bookends have been stalling... stalling... stalling... and I've taken up Sporcle... and a wierd Risk-style game on my computer... and volunteering... and basically I've been doing everything and anything to put it off.

But, yesterday evening I felt like doing some animation.

And now it's almost finished.

And so, because you are my loyal nonexistent readers, I thought I'd give you a special sneak preview before it goes up on Youtube (whenever that happens). Sound effects and so forth still need a little work on their timing.

Enjoy this 15 second intro.

And if you work for Cadbury, tell them that I really like Mini-Eggs and want them all year round.

Smivel and spread the word that I am awesome beyond compare. For a flake.

Brave - Reviewdom

So I was going to write about age-based discrimination (and will probably follow with a short post on it) but I realised that I hadn't revied the awesome Brave yet. 

BRAVE

                 -Disney/Pixar,
                 -conceived by Brenda Chapman,
                 -directed by Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman.


The first thing I have to say is that it doesn't remotely seem 93 minutes long, which has two implications 1) at no point is the plot uninteresting and 2) You leave feeling a tiny bit cheated because it was over so soon.

This possibly has something to do with a short animation (a delightful little piece entitled "La Luna") at the beginning, which accounts for about ten minutes of that running time, not to mention that credits always take much longer for animated features. But La Luna is worth seeing (7/10 at least), and Brave isn't all that short... it just finishes before you're prepared to leave.

The premise:

Our heroine, the fiesty Scottish Merida, who is also a princess, considers it grossly unfair that she has to get married just because otherwise her peaceful land will be torn asunder by war. This seems a little brattish, but we soon meet the suitors, whereupon we instantly forgive her.

Anyway, Merida picks up on the fact that her father is more interested in belching, role-play and hunting bears than he is in actually keeping the kingdom afloat, and thereby deduces that it is because of her mother, Queen Elinor (Shock, horror, a Disney flick with a living mother???). She quickly offends almost everyone present by ably demonstrating that anything men can do, she can do better, and with the assistance of teenage hormones and her lovable horse Angus, she storms out of the castle to have a private rant. 

The rest of the basic premise is pretty standard - she looks for a quick fix to her problems, it all goes horribly wrong and everyone learns something about themself in the process. But, in fairness to Brenda Chapman's story, no plotline is really original when you break it down to a single sentence. 

The finer details...

The major focus of this film - in a break from both Pixar's and Disney's general ideas - is the mother-daughter dynamic. As is Pixar's trademark, though, there are very few points in the film where the major focus is the only thing happening, and it does its best to make you laugh, cry and think all at the same time. 

Kelly Macdonald and Emma Thompson (Merida and Elinor, respectively) dominate the plot, and, in good old Disney fashion, their performances are perfect. Billy Connolly and Julie Walters, despite having a lot less to do with the plot directly, both voice very memorable characters that entertain without upstaging the main pair. Characters gain depth and fallibility within just a few lines, as much from the well though-out script as from animation so fluid that you can almost forget that it's not real.

I have to tell you that bears feature. This is shown in the trailer, so I don't consider it a major spoiler, but it needs to be said anyway because of the quality of the animation. It is extraordinary.

Forget Sulley's fur in Monsters, Inc. and the sea anemones in Finding Nemo (based on Sulley's fur) - they were ingenious and groundbreaking, yes, but they have nothing on this. The animators for Sulley, for those of you who don't know, went to extraordinary lengths to make the lovable monster's long hair look realistic - an onorous task which entailed animating thousands of individual hairs to respond to position and environment. In Brave, the animators have produced hair which is long enough to respond to environmental influences such as the wind, water etc, but short enough that it also shows the movement of flesh underneath this. And it is incredibly realistic.

Overall, it is the incredibly attentive animation that forces the viewer to take the plot seriously, and unlike many animations, make it easy for even older viewers to forget that the danger is imaginary. 

Any further ado will inevitably lead to spoilers, which I don't consider a good thing, so let's get straight to the scores:


Visuals: 10/10, although - as it moves the bar upwards - probably 11/10 when compared to any previous animation.
Writing: 8/10 - most of it was beautifully original, and it certainly flowed like a 10, but some details of the plot were annoyingly predictable.
Voice Acting: 10/10, easily. Accents were either real or pulled off beautifully, some complex vocal work was done and every emotion written was expressed precisely in the voice.
Score: 10/10. A touch of celtic goodness kept it out of the land of cliches for a Disney score, but still managed to create the mood and set the scene just as required.

so, Overall: 9.5 (brilliant)

I should, however, draw your attention to the fact that if you watch films just for the plot, you're looking at an 8/10 - very good, but not brilliant.

Volunteering... animal shelter.

Wildlife shelters are wierd.

I say this not because I consider it odd to want to save animals that have become injured by modern society and thereafter retard the species evolution by returning these injured animals to the wild. As a general rule, I do not believe that animal shelters do retard evolution for two major reasons:

1) In the UK, most species handled are either city-thriving species that have already adapted to modern life or at such low numbers that as many animals as possible have to be kept going, regardless of genetic quality just to prevent Allee* effects.

2) The bulk of animals treated in these animal shelters are birds and mammals, which are indisputably able to learn from their own mistakes and - in many cases - have also been proven capable of learning from the mistakes of others. Thus Action A, if followed by pain and stress, will be avoided in the future even if the animal survives.

Be that as it may, Wildlife shelters are awash with paradoxes:

1) Human hospitals smell of two things (in my experience) - Disinfectant and bodily fluids, even on non-surgical . With all the herring-gulls, ducks, pigeons and hedgehogs distributing their business as far and wide as possible, you'd expect that the predominant smells in the shelter would be similar. But instead, it smells of disinfectant and food (as far as you can call the cat-food that hedgehogs seem to love above all else "food").

2) When you open a cage, there is no way of saying how you'll feel after you've cleaned it, weighed the resident and closed the door. A mangy little hedgehog with no fur can be happy and hyper and quite definitely planning on living, and you'll leave (and scrub your hands) with a huge smile on your face from the adorable little zombie... while a larger hedgehog with a very positive history can have suddenly decided not to drink and losing weight at a rate of knots, and you feel like you're going to throw up just seeing it fade.

3) When someone walks through the door with a box, you're heart goes up and down at the same time. You can't wait to see this new and exciting animal, but then, of course, this new and exciting animal has to have been injured in some way (most probably by idiots with guns and/or dogs).

4) You can be the shallowest, least philosophical git on the surface of the planet (me) and you'll still feel obliged to find flowery euphemisms for death afterwards.


It's made me feel really good and really awful at the same time.


I conclude - it's wierd.

I plan to go again. 





*To put it simply, Allee effects come in when organisms cross a critical threshold and, although they are present throughout a large environment, their chances of finding a mate before they get eaten/expire are effectively nil, so the population rapidly dwindles and disappears

Volunteering in Conversation Rant

This one is a bit personal. 

So I suppose we need to actually talk about me.


I'm not just unemployed. I have aspirations. I have plans. I even have dreams (see my rather unrealistic to do list...). And - as much as I may joke about the impossibility of it - the core of it is that I sat through genetics lectures in order to get enough credits to keep learning a bit more about conservation. Because I love wildlife, and I love nature, and would really like to conserve it.


Then we get to the part with my s***ty dissertation. It was poor topic, more than regulation hours of lab work, and far too small a sample for there to be more than a fractional chance that anything of interest would be found. This didn't put me off, until my statistics showed me that actually I'd found something quite useful, but that unhelpful voice reassured me that nothing would ever come of an undergraduate dissertation. So I had a low patch and effectively self-sabotaged, turned in an atrociously under-written dissertation and as a result missed a good grade by 1.2%.


The result of this is that - in order to progress any further in academia, I really have to have some practical experience (not to mention money). Apparently self-directed practical experience from 22 years analysing the differences between the degraded UK environment and the rapidly degrading central african environment doesn't count. The best thing to do, or so I'm told, is volunteer.

And here lies the point which I want to discuss.

The UK's version of conservation sucks. Yes, their protective laws are groundbreaking, and their capacity for enforcement of laws is brilliant, but they seem to have forgotten that nature exists. It doesn't help that a lot of conservation organisations - home and away - are actually run by hunters who want to conserve nature in such a way that makes it easier to shoot (bluntly), but environments are overmanaged.

It is a garden state and many "pro-conservation" people firmly believe that maintaining the patchwork of farmland is important because the countryside has to be in use. They also can't seem to grasp that a healthy ecosystem is self regulating and, by controlling any native organism, you are reducing the food of its natural predator and thereby causing yourself to need to keep controlling.

Heathlands - which are a species rich but transitional habitat - are over-maintained. Naturally it would appear when woodland burns, and disappear once soil recovered and a bad season limited grazer numbers enough for trees to recover. But grouse are easier to shoot on open ground, so charities maintain vast areas of open moorland and heathland because the landowners have had centuries to instill in us that trees will destory the habitat.

Broadleaf forest - which naturally covers more-or-less all of the dry land in the country and thus regulates rainfall - is all but gone. Where it's not gone, the forestry commision has "dangerous" trees removed - that is to say, old trees which are becoming hollow and thus perfect for woodpeckers, bats and countless beetles. Dead wood is gathered up, and all our decomposers are disappearing as a result - or moving on to live plants (slugs being a notable example of an animal that, in the absence of its primary food source, become a major pest).

Waterways have been straightened and cleared, and I have actually seen parks noting their good work in clearing trees along banks where they were outshading other vegetation. Because, you know, that won't reduce soil stability and increase runoff and stifle the life within the pond/lake at all. Straighter waterways are maintained because it "reduces flooding risk" - my arse. It creates a flood/drought cycle instead: water runs fast down hills, creating flash-floods on the flats which, not dampened by bends, can become dangerous. On a small island, it gets to the sea quite quickly, and heads off into the channel leaving us parched for the rest of the year.

Britain is also the only country I know of where the vast majority of nature reserves are actually in use as grazing land.

Because "that's what the ecosystem needs".

Many of our ecosystems, such as heathland and some areas of downland, do benefit from low-intensity grazing. You can tell low intensity grazing because the grass isn't clipped right down to the earth in such a way that one good day of rainfall washes everything away. High intensity grazing creates a disturbed habitat which is about as species-rich as astroturf, and only slightly more natural.

And everyone says "you should get involved".

As an entry level volunteer, you don't really have any opportunities to innovate, change and sent things in a less ridiculously counter-productive direction. As an entry level volunteer in UK conservation, the best you can hope for is that your contribution doesn't do much extra damage.


Okay, rant over. Point is, I'm going to volunteer at a charity shop instead until I can get paid work at a zoo because frankly, they encourage wildlife a shedload better than british nature reserves do.

In Love and Zombies...

Bit of a random (surprise?) and quite a short (hooray!) one today... 


Let me start by saying that I find liberated intellectuals highly attractive.


To break that down, for me to be attracted, someone typically has to check these two boxes:


             1) They defy gender stereotypes.

             2) They eat knowledge for breakfast.



Being bat-shit crazy helps, but I'm not sure I actually know anyone who isn't, on some level, bat-shit crazy, so I don't think it's necessary to put it up there.



There are a lot more women/girls out there fitting these rigorous expectations than you might expect. And probably about sixty percent of the ones I've been lucky enough to meet don't treat me like an idiot for having a sense of humour, so the question remains as to why I have not yet seduced and married one of them before moving to Australia and having lots of sex and babies...


Yesterday, I finally worked it out. 


In a typical romance, there are a number of ways of expressing affection:

                 1) Asking on dates.

                 2) Paying for dinner.

                 3) EPS (Excess public slobbering).

                 4) Purchasing of flowers.

                 5) Purchasing of jewellery.

                 6) Going on holiday together.

                 7) Watching romantic DVDs together.

                 8) A nice bottle of wine.

                 9) A slow dance.

...and so forth until proposal. 

For me, expressing affection is much simpler. On the way to finding myself attracted to someone,  there is a point where my I decide that they are awesome, and as soon as that happens, one of two sentences is going to be randomly chosen and blurted out of my mouth without any input from me:

             1) "I want to eat your brain."

         2) "I want your brain on a stick."


What's most worrying - infinitely more than anyone that I am ever interested in thinking that I was raised in a Papua New Guinean tribe - is that on some very basic level I actually think like that.

Awesomeness = Yummy brains.

I really do need to find some way around this.

Now go forth and smivel without getting Cruetzfeldt-Jakob's Disease...

Rejection, Failure... My life continues.

So, lately a few good things have happened to me:

1) I passed my driving theory (thank you, Pearson Vue and your distinctly odorous Portsmouth offices)

2) I learned that I would not incur charges on my overdraft unless I was still in it in November (Thank you, Halifax and your double-sent letters).

3) I got out of my overdraft (Thank you, Dole... I think).

4) My father sent me details of this awesome volunteering post that has become available in the centre of the universe (= thank you, immediate paternal ancestor).

5) I got a nice macro of a Conopid fly (Physocephala rufipes) in the garden, having never even seen a live conopid before (Conopids: bizarre nectar-feeding flies which seem to be related to hoverflies, with elongated antennae and larvae which are endoparasites of various bees, wasps etc): here is a quick and half-hearted edit of it especially for you:

and

5) The evil monstrous hearless nice bitch cow devil-woman lady at the pit of despair job centre was not horrible the second time I saw her.


Unfortunately, the bad things keep happening:

1) I remain utterly unemployed.

2) I am only out of my overdraft because I am on the dole, which is increasinly making me want to die.

3) For some obscure reason, the government thinks I would make a good juror. I thought this was a good (or at least interesting)  thing until I realised that a) it means that I cannot apply for anything overseas because I would then have to return halfway through and irk my employer right out of their socks and b) if any of the stuff I have applied for overseas says yes (unlikely, I admit) I'll have to explain that I now can't, unless they feel like postponing my start date.

4) Two jobs that I had applied for which were local and unambitious (so I thought I had a good chance) have turned me down.

5) I have to see the dragon lady on 9.11 (American style date to make the point that although I am in the UK, I have an appointment with a monster lady on the eleventh anniversary of an event that makes me feel petty for being miserable).

6) I do not handle rejection well and as a direct result of having two rejections in one "send and receive", I am having to drink copious amounts of tea to remain even remotely functional.

7) My best friend has buggered of to Bath to do some singing for a week. Which means that my life is in dire need of comic relief.



I want to have some sudden inspiration as to how to see these things in a positive light... but currently I lack any inspiration and require more tea. 


I'm going to watch Kiwi! on youtube in order to feel more tragic... is this logical?


And then I'm going to daydream about being Australian.

Smivel