On the way down to LA, we very suddenly ran into a traffic jam on I-5, which is highly unusual. Wasn’t sure if it was holiday traffic or an accident up ahead. Eventually after twenty minutes of slooooow moving, we saw it… a really bad accident, with a van overturned and dents on all sides… and someone on a stretcher. :(

It was cleared off to the side, except for this splash of glass shards in the right lane, which some cars gingerly chose to drive around. So most of the slowdown was due to rubbernecking, but admittedly that was a pretty severe accident. ;_;

• Vowed to play more games… other than December (where I barely glanced at World of Goo), I did pretty well.
• Suffered a ton trying to come up with film ideas for Andreas’s class. -_-
• Did some webwork for Tracy… converting her old website into a CMS controlled one.
• Angelina got engaged. O_O
• Learned how to do DVD authoring, which is kind of neat.
• Gary Gygax died. :(
• Went to Vegas for spring break. Ate at Top of the World for Dad’s birthday.
• Filed taxes for the first time. :P
• Got published in the Nina’s book about ATDP… sort of.
• Checked out the third years thesis show and was really impressed.
• Some people decided to sue AOL and I got a notice, but ignored it. >_>
• Laptop’s graphics card was fried… had to send it in and get the motherboard replaced. (June)
• My mother started selling gay bear caketops.
• Resumed playing badminton during the summer and actually learned how to do backhand shots. :x
• ATDP 2008. Co-taught TIC with Trev, of course. Spark taught Java for the first time as well.
• Got the kids hooked on Taboo and Guillotine. ;x
• Decided Terrance makes the best cheesecakes on the planet.
• Had our first ATDP party at my mother’s store
• Decided I needed to get a Wii for Wii Fit… but it wasn’t an easy decision … and then it was really hard to find. -_-
• Created The TIC and Java Adventure.
• Another party at the satinroses store
• Went to Tacoma/Fircrest to visit Dev for a week. :D
• Went through hell to get BlizzCon tickets
• Posed The Million Dollar Question … need to remember to check this when we find out the answer. ::lol::
• Wrote my first year IMD retrospective… better late than never, I guess. >_>
• Gas went up to over $5. ;_;
• Avoided two earthquakes in quick succession
• Dev’s Joust Venture
• Got an unpaid internship with Blindlight.
• Got sick with some kind of stomach virus, which I denied was a stomach virus for a long time… until I got campus-wide e-mail that there was a stomach flu epidemic. O.o
• Started suffering through 6 hour classes on my Saturdays, with Bruce Block, but at least they only lasted half a semester. >_>;
• Heroes season 3 started.
• The most nail-biting election year ever. >_>
• BlizzCon 08! Day 1, Day 2. Dev and Sander came down from WA, Vinny came from … er, LA. ::lol:: Had a crapton of fun, even if Dev didn’t win drama category, boo.
• Obama, Obama, Obama! but… STUPID PROP 8.
• Gas drops down to below what it was when I started driving. O.o
• My sister-in-law had a baby boy and I’m an aunt now. O.o
• Wrath of the Lich King came out. Got one level a day until 80. :x
• Bought a kickass new Canon G10 camera. S’just a point and click, but I don’t want anything more sophisticated than that. >_>;
• ATDP Thanksgiving Roadtrip.
• Quickly put-together a working MT log for Manda. :P
• Finished 506 photo notebook
• My laptop’s graphics card got fried AGAIN… ARGH.
• Found out SFGC was invited to perform at the inauguration. Got mad jealous.
• Went to the new Academy of Sciences with the Pokechat crew.
• End of the year with the SC… Christmas 08 and bridesmaid dress fitting and shoe shopping.

2008 Entertainment

• Unreal 3
• The Golden Compass (movie)
• Dreamgirls
• Majora’s Mask
• Crush
• PuzzleQuest
• Juno
• Patapon
• 42 Russians On Ice (O.o)
• South Park movie
• Portal
• The Time-Traveler’s Wife (book)
• Everyday Shooter
• PennyArcade game (demo only)
• Holes (the Disney movie)
• Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull … or whatever it’s called. O.o
• Seabiscuit (movie)
• Wall-E
• Hancock (movie)
• Shadowbridge (book)
• The Dark Knight (movie, omg Heath Ledger :( )
• Twilight Princess
• Bedtime Stories (movie)
• board games: Carcassonne, Shadows Over Camelot, Modern Art, Munchkin

2008 Creative

• Tronland
• Multiplayer Oregon Trail
• MUSE
• Elevator Park
• satinroses.com conversion to MT4
• RS2 (just the VO, you know)
• Sehndova
• uh… “A Dark and Stormy Night”, which is still not finished enough for me to want to share. :(
• photo notebook / new Flickr account

party, party all day long…

Angelina volunteered to host the New Years festivities this year, so we all trundled over there around 5pm. (me and vikki were kind of on time for once, but we were the first ones there. :x ) We decided on potluck, so everyone was bringing dishes to relieve Angelina’s mother of the burden of cooking for us. Teehee.

There was a ridiculous amount of food by the time everyone arrived and we had excess leftovers. On top of that, Angelina had a ton of sample wedding cakes delivered so that we could all do some formal taste-testing to decide on what cake she would have for her actual wedding. It was pretty hilarious, all of us crowded around five cake samples and Angelina slicing these tiny slices — both because we were totally stuffed from dinner, and because there were a lot of people who needed to try it.

We wrote out our pro opinions (::lol::) on pieces of paper and then ranked our favorites… which ended up being a pretty fruitless exercise, cause opinions were all over the place and no cake stood out as the winner. Still, it was productive, and Angelina decided that she’ll be asking the cake maker about a combination of two of the cakes that were present. Woo.

We started a game of Munchkin, but paused halfway through to ring in the New Year on television… which was extremely disappointing. Dick Clark’s New Year was the only thing on… and it was pretty terrible. (Dick Clark’s gettin’ too old… and needs less botox. >_> ) No one seemed to be having any fireworks at all. D: Economy killing the partiez?

Well, not my parties! New Years Day was the “moo” party, I suppose it’s called now… and I met all the ATDP kids at CV BART and between me and Quad, we chauffeured all of them over to my place. Wii games and card games and board games galore, spaghetti and garlic bread dinner (thanks Mom >_> ) and “What Dreams May Come”.

Actually, I had a pretty good night all things considered… didn’t try the WoW TCG, but I won the prolonged Munchkin game (thanks to the skunk mob that prevented all interference :O ), played the underdog to Quad’s overpowered sheriff abilities, and dominated the Modern Art game that we played after everyone else had gone. ::lol::

incoming…!

• Driving back to LA tomorrow. :(
• One more week of break… need to get my laptop repaired…
• More grad school. No work planned, but maybe do some stuff for Tracy?
• Have to decide on a thesis for this semester! :X canwesayomg
• ANGELINA’S GETTING MARRIED IN MAY. HOLY %&#$
• Teaching TIC for ATDP 2009
• Begin third year of grad school
• ????????

The more things change, the more they stay the same!

It’s funny how we never, ever crashed the mall when we were teenagers and today was the first time we had ever stepped foot in a mall together to buy something.

The results were not all that strappy, but very high heels that I’m certainly not used to wearing. Oh well. >_>

The Craft of War: BLIND.

I’m reading all the comments left on the Vimeo and noticing a few similar things: for Blizz to get off their ass and hire this guy to do their cinematics. Which has me kind of defensive, since I know the guy who did the Wrathgate cinematic and I like him and he does good work.

But here’s the dig, guys (and all you unknowing Vimeo commenters). What Percula does in “Craft of War” is NOT MACHINIMA. (only BaronSoosdon who commented seemed to recognize this.)

He’s an animator and has tons of experience animating, so what he did was take the WoW models and put them in some really pro animating tool and then moved the skeleton around. Which is absolutely not what machinima people do. It takes too long, for one thing, which is against the “machinima way” if you will… of getting things done relatively quickly.

And as vague as the term “machine cinema” is, I’m pretty sure Percula’s process does not qualify for our current definition. The game could just not exist and Percula would have been able to produce “Craft of War” as long as he got access to models, whereas all machinimators would be screwed.

That said, it’s still an excellent, excellent animation piece. (::lol::) I do have a similar complaint to some of the other comments, which is that the music when it first sets in makes the overall piece take a comic tone and I was actually unsure whether the soldiers were actually hearing the music themselves or what… but that goes away when the instrumentation changes. If this were a really pro production, probably would/should have gotten a music guy to remix the beginning so that it would be more appropriate throughout.

Actually I don’t remember a single one-liner from the film now. ::lol:: Terrible. Oh well. It was just cute. XP

All I’ve done so far is updated my mom’s site, and the parents are puttering around downstairs. Think I’d like to go out and eat dinner (at that new french restaurant? ::lol::) and catch a movie…

Can’t even remember what flavor that is. Something about cinnamon chile chipotle or something. O.o

And I couldn’t find the scotch tape, so my Secret Santa gift had to be put in a gift bag with lots of tissue paper. Good thing I have plenty that I’ve saved from previous years. D:

One thing that I have to reckon with is the power of nostalgia, which probably makes the old AoS feel like it was a lot more impressive and fun than it actually was when I used to go. ::lol:: I think that they really did have more stuff and that it was all much better presented… and the only reason why I feel like it was a bit lackluster is because of time’s biased lenses.

I rather feel that the museum is, in the end, a much more impressive architectural feat than interactive experience. They claim it’s the greenest museum on the planet, and I’d believe it with their plethora of solar panels and their jet-powered hand dryers. :x The Academy definitely had a stronger “preserve our planet” message threaded through all the exhibits than it ever had before, even with trash bins that were labeled recycling, compost, and landfill so that you would think twice about how much stuff was going to the dump.

But I was super impressed by how they threaded all the exhibits together, much like the single exhibit rain forest was, with large tanks of the aquarium viewable both from underneath and far above. What an intelligent use of space.

Learning from my brief experience on Wednesday, I made sure we squared away passes for both the bug movie and the planetarium show … then we killed time in the smaller exhibits before watching the two films, and then did the rain forest and aquarium last… since those had the most stuffing. And our run today just confirmed that the latter two exhibits had the most to offer in terms of entertainment and interest.

I dunno how the other kids entertained themselves, but me and Quad just practiced our photo snapping skills the entire time. ::lol:: Here’s my prize-winning shot of the entire trip…

At any rate, not the most wonderful amazing experience ever, but still fun. :)