Orangutans Are Not Monkeys.

As a kid I used to always draw monkeys. When I lived in the Philippines I even had a pet monkey. His name? Monkey. That's before I knew about the Department Of Redundancy Department. Anyway, I WACoodled an orangutan, which is not a monkey. Orangs are apes.

I finally got a chance to watch Victor Navone's lecture from last week and all I can say is wow! I'm not sure which I was more impressed with, Victor's animation talent, his skill with the graph editor, or the fact that our school rocks for having this kind of stuff in the curriculum. Hopefully I'll get a last chance to watch at least part of it again. I think it's 2andahalf hours long!

Since Maya was giving me grief I took a break from 3D and was messing around in Plastic Animation Paper 4.0 beta. I had clicked over to AM classmate (though currently on a leave of "AMsence"...isn't that hilarious?) Robert Casumbal's blog and was inspired to do my own flour sack test (QT h.264, 50k). Okay, I copied him, but my test is way different. I've done one other sack test before this one--I tried to do a walk--and I am still confused about how a character with no legs should be drawn walking. Better look at some reference. This test isn't a walk, it's just sort of a hero sack going from a one-arm-up, semi-relaxed state, to a "super" pose or something. I didn't do much planning at all and it shows. I should get that Wayne Gilbert book Robert mentioned soon. Looking at the test you will likely see that frame 9 is lame-o. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do there, so if you have any suggestions on that drawing or any of this let me know.

The rest of this blog is unrelated to animation. Feel free to skip it.

I contacted someone at a senior resource Thursday to try to get help with my IHSS share-of-cost/income tax fiasco. (Incidentally, as big a fan I am of the game smush I haven't come up with a smush that combines tax and fiasco in a way that pleases me or I would use it here. Probably has something to do with their meanings.) The lady told me outright that one of the possible avenues I was hoping to explore would be a dead end. Sounded like she was speaking from actual experience, too. But there is a completely different route she told me about that, if she's correct, will resolve the tax problem. The share of cost will not be relieved, but solving the tax thing is huge. It's a somewhat exotic idea, but its oddity isn't gonna stop me from trying it. Friday I left a message with my mom's IHSS caseworker to get this plan rolling. If not for all this complication and nonsense I'd probably already be enjoying my tax refund.