Molrak.com
Daily Digital Wanderlust

Note: The following was originally posted on January 16th, 2005. I wasn’t very good about maintaining my blog back then and lost the 3-4 posts from this era, but thankfully the Internet Wayback Machine saved them for me.

One of the disadvantages of going to a small school is that you get to know everyone on campus. Anonymity, a luxury at many large universities, is a danger for the ‘at-risk’ student (as it was for me when I went to Moo-U), but at times it was nice to be able to blend into the crowd.

This is my third full-time semster at this school, and I’ve gotten to know the students in my department rather well. One of the biggest annoyances during this week has been listening to students say, “I won’t need this class in the real world,” or “I won’t need this class to be a ____.” Apparently these know-it-all students are not only smarter and more talented than their peers, but smarter than the faculty as well. Granted, some of the requirements for animation students at my school are a bit off the wall, because they shoved us in with the Graphic Design students. Yet the principles of traditional design and art are necessary to be a good animator, even in Maya.

Many students at my school try to get out of classes with certain ‘tough’ professors, and they try to only take classes from professors who employ soft love instead of tough love. Both approaches to teaching are valid-at first, positive reinforcement will help the student explore their potential, and they will grow. But at some point, the student must make the transition into the real world, and students need to know what expectations will be like in the real world. Students should also realize that they shouldn’t be obligated to work themselves to death like a med student in residency or your average EA employee.

Note: The following post was originally posted on January 13th, 2005. I wasn’t very good about maintaining my blog back then and lost the 3-4 posts from this era, but thankfully the Internet Wayback Machine saved them for me.

The popularity of digital art tools, especially Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, has led to a bit of a crisis in the visual arts. Students are learning with the handicap of the undo–a useful crutch, but a crutch all the same. As my art professor pontificated yesterday, a good artist doesn’t worry about making mistakes, because a good artist knows how to fix these mistakes.

This reminded me of a saying public television art legend Bob Ross would often say, “We don’t make mistakes here, we just have happy accidents.” That truly was the genius of Bob, he knew that for many amateurs, things would just seem to happen with the brush. Bob would show how these accidents could be turned into something wonderful. Bob’s “happy mistakes” turned the tedium of painting into a joy.

This necessity to adapt, the process of discovering the tabula rasa, is slowly being lost in an era of infinite undo’s and thousands of layers. It may be turning a generation of digital artists and designers into hopeless perfectionists. I can’t count how many times people have pined for a real-life undo button for their analog artwork, and I even find myself doing so at times. Somehow the eraser isn’t quite as gratifying as a perfect undo step. The challenge the digital artist constantly faces is to constantly draw in their sketchbooks, paint on their canvas or paper, and force themselves to tackle difficult challenges and mistakes in order to improve their artistic abilities.

Note: The following post is based off a longer post originally posted on January 11th, 2005. I wasn’t very good about maintaining my blog back then and lost the 3-4 posts from this era, but thankfully the Internet Wayback Machine saved them for me.

I’ve been a life-long lover of animation and have been watching cartoons for as long as I can remember. Unlike most children, I never really stopped watching cartoons. The Simpsons began in 1989-1990, while I was still in elementary school, and I’ve been watching almost every Sunday (and Thursday) night since season two or three. I was also indoctrinated in the usual Disney fare as a youth. I really was a great time to love cartoons, as Disney’s second golden age came around the same time The Simpsons first aired. I still recall going into the theater to watch Oliver and Company-not Disney’s best effort, but the film that preceeded the immensely popular The Little Mermaid.

While Disney’s films were popular with kids, they struck a false chord with me. My parents were big believers in reading to my sister and I when we were young, and thus we knew Hans Christian Anderson’s wonderful tale before we saw The Little Mermaid. Even as a child, something just didn’t quite feel right about the Disney company’s treatment of their source material. As I’ve grown, I’ve learned to accept the sugarization of Disney’s fare while still resenting that feeling that kids couldn’t handle the classic fairy tales that served kids well up until the motion picture arrived.

I’ve also been a long-time fan of Looney Tunes, which are grand examples of short cartoons which appeal to young and old alike. In a perfect world, Warner Brothers would recognize the brilliance in that cast of characters instead of butchering them with the recent series of films and tv shows they have appeared in. The only recent decent effort that I can think of off the top of my head was the short-lived Duck Dodgers series, but even that was followed by the unwatchable Loonatics Unleashed.

Of course, if copyright laws around the world were more sane than they are today, corporations would have less incentive to milk old cartoon characters (or dead celebrities) in horrible ways. The last thing I want to see in the retirement home is He-Man trying to sell me robotic vacuum cleaners.

Long time followers of this site (all 2-3 of you) will have noted a brief outage in the site around the new year, followed by a new look for Molrak.com, and since then a relative silence. This is not without cause. One of my New Year’s goals was to properly maintain my public blog here on molrak.com, which I’ve been neglecting for at least 2 years. When I sat down on December 30th to work on the redesign (I wasn’t really planning ahead as far as New Year’s goals go, I know), I first tried to identify why I hadn’t updated the old one much, and then I tried to come up with a few goals for what the new site should look like and do. The problems were easily identified, but the solutions were not so obvious.

I was not satisfied with the old design of the site, partly due to how it was hooked into k2. While the k2 theme for WordPress has many powerful features, it was another layer of compatibility which I had to struggle with. Instead of doing yet another k2 redesign, I opted to try to design my own derivative theme, using the default WordPress theme as a base (the default theme is based on Kubrick, which is the predecessor of K2). The default WordPress theme is incredibly well thought out, although I prefer to use %’s, ex’s, and em’s for my units instead of pixels.

I knew I wanted a redesign. I had a starting point, now all I needed was a destination. When beginning any design project, I start with either an outline or a thumbnail. For this project, the thumbnail came first. I had a vague idea of what I wanted the site to look like. For whatever reason I prefer the black background for my personal sites. Perhaps it’s because I still spend most of my time in front of a CRT monitor, maybe it’s my background in computers going back to Apple ][’s and the old Tandy 1000HX running DOS 2, or because I agree with Maddox’s view on staring into lightbulbs. I set my palette for dark swatch, and with gradients being all the rage nowadays for buttons and backgrounds, I figured I should probably use some of those to keep up with the cool kids. The first step was complete, I had my quick thumbnail.

But there were problems with the old blog besides the design, the greatest issue being that I seldom updated the it. For that matter, I wasn’t updating any of the three live domains on the net. Time was an issue, first due to school and then due to time spent looking after Little Nephew, but that wasn’t entirely it. I had to figure out why I wasn’t updating, and what I could do to address that problem. I decided to look at what I did and do participate in. I’m active a lot of social sites, from lj to myspace to facebook, but I also dump data into a lot of other conduits, like del.icio.us, last.fm, and twitter. While I have a decent number of friends on the pure social sites, I don’t really have many contacts on the others. Regardless of the networks, I had a lot of good data in those other sites that was kind of isolated in them. Facebook’s applications were a great way to gather my tweets, links, and music, but I still didn’t have control of the data. What I really wanted was some way to pull all this data into one location.

It was an issue of scattering. I had all these cool sites but no central location. I toyed with the idea over the summer of doing a tumblelog, but couldn’t decide on a platform. I was also fairly pleased with how del.icio.us worked, although I still wish there was a via form on the site to credit link referrers. As I toyed around with other options including pownce, I finally opened a twitter account, originally to follow Merlin Mann’s tweets, but then I became enamored of the interface. The 140 character limit became a challenge, like writing a great haiku or limerick. Between del.icio.us and twitter, I had two thirds of the tumblelog equation, just on separate sites. I looked through aggregators for WordPress but couldn’t really find something that quite fit with what I wanted to do. I gave up for the summer.

So as the end of 2007 was fast approaching, I looked for aggregators again and finally found one that worked fairly well for WordPress. As I was already subscribing to my del.icio.us links and my twitter tweets, I knew it would be trivial to then import them into my blog, rebranding them generically as links and blurbs. Last.fm proved more difficult, as the top artists for the week is only available in xml instead of rss or atom feeds. I toyed with yahoo pipes but couldn’t quite get the output in a format I liked. I’m still playing around with options, including writing a php or python script to handle the problem for me automatically.

From that point, I knew I could get all this stuff into WordPress, now it was an issue of figuring out how to set WordPress up to properly handle all this varied information. At this point, I decided that I wanted to include my flickr stream as well. At first I thought I was going to have to set up separate WordPress installations for each content stream. After some further research, I was able to dump each outside source into its own category. Armed with a few choice plugins and some php modifications, I was able to keep each category separate from the main post stream (or the blog, if you will).

My posting content designed and structured, it was time to do some css/xhtml/php editing. The only structural differences (that I can remember at this point) to the original template as far as design work was concerned consisted of moving the header and the insertion of the navbar/pages bar across the top of the page. Everything else was well-formatted. The css modifications were a bit trickier, and I ended up adding a few classes and id’s to get things how I wanted them.

At this point, I had automated content coming in from sources I update elsewhere and a design I was relatively pleased with, but there was still one issue. I didn’t really like having quicklinks/asides in the sidebar on every page as k2 did, and I really didn’t see the point in having my tweets on every page. A front page was needed, which could then point users to the blog or optionally other content. While the design on the social aggregator currently is close to my original concept, it is still in need of further refinement. However, it was functional and serving data to the index crawlers, the css could come later.

Now the pieces were together, but there was one issue left. The feeds only went back 20-30 posts, and I had over 300 links posted on del.icio.us. Thus began the process of manually entering all the old content so that I could have a complete reference to them. It took a while and nearly cost me my sanity, but I finished that up last night (on the evening of January 15th).

Now I have a functioning, hopefully aesthetically appealing site that I will want to update. There are still a few warts to deal with, but it’s only a matter of time before they’re cleaned up. The only real challenge left is keeping this thing filled with content.

molrak posted an image:

The march toward a better tomorrow begins with the businessmen of today! HAIL COMMERCE!

See Walking Businessmen on flickr.

An admirable film companion
Review by Nikolaus Ehm.

Ask almost any kid (or more than a few college students) who lives in a pineapple under the sea, and the answer will be the same–SpongeBob Squarepants, the titular hero of this wild adventure through the ocean depths. Facing the dangers of Plankton, King Neptune, bikers, hitmen, cyclops, and Hasselhoff, Spongebob and his BFF Patrick must tread all these dangers to save the future of Bikini Bottom and the Krusty Krab.

The film’s brightest moments are its most bizarre, like Patrick and Spongebob’s bubble dance in a tough guy bar bathroom, the duo’s musical montage through a dark ravine filled with all sorts hideous monsters, and their faceoff against a hitman onboard the SS Hasselhoff. At times the gags are fast and furious, but at times one is left feeling that they were stretching a few scenes out to justify the cost of making them.

The animation and art throughout the film are greatly improved while still maintaining the style and feel from the television series, a difficult feat to achieve. The new backgrounds and character designs are gorgeous, and if there was 3d done on the project, it didn’t show.

The new characters are memorable, but their line reads don’t have the same magic that the regular cast has. Neptune’s daughter, voiced by Scarlett Johansson, feels flat and doesn’t seem to really interact with the primary cast until the film nears its end. However, these new characters come at a cost. As is often the case with animated films, the secondary characters are largely MIA throughout the film. Fans of Mr. Krabs, Sandy Cheeks, or even Squidward will largely be disappointed.

The ending descends into the depths of the bizarre. What started as a beautiful buddy adventure pic falls into the utterly outlandish, including the obligatory Spongebob rock sequence and more than a few disturbing (but G-rated) up close shots of David Hasselhoff. The theme of the film, that kids are important, is repeated more and more as the film nears its end. While a bit over the top, it’s a positive message for kids and helps to move the plot forward.

The video on the DVD, presented in the original widescreen format, is clean and the sound is acceptable. There are a few featurettes on the disc, but nothing that spectacular or memorable. While fans might pine for a more full-featured special edition, the disc has comparable special features as though available on the TV series discs.

Despite the film’s shortcomings, it was still a fast and enjoyable 90 minute ride. Fans of the series will love it, and those with children will find the film surprisingly enjoyable. It stands admirably well as a companion to the original two or three seasons of the series.

Buy The Spongebob Squarepants Movie DVD at Amazon.com.17e2b_113YXX9KW2L.jpg” border=”0″ height=”75″ width=”53″ />
An admirable film companion
Review by Nikolaus Ehm.

Ask almost any kid (or more than a few college students) who lives in a pineapple under the sea, and the answer will be the same–SpongeBob Squarepants, the titular hero of this wild adventure through the ocean depths. Facing the dangers of Plankton, King Neptune, bikers, hitmen, cyclops, and Hasselhoff, Spongebob and his BFF Patrick must tread all these dangers to save the future of Bikini Bottom and the Krusty Krab.

The film’s brightest moments are its most bizarre, like Patrick and Spongebob’s bubble dance in a tough guy bar bathroom, the duo’s musical montage through a dark ravine filled with all sorts hideous monsters, and their faceoff against a hitman onboard the SS Hasselhoff. At times the gags are fast and furious, but at times one is left feeling that they were stretching a few scenes out to justify the cost of making them.

The animation and art throughout the film are greatly improved while still maintaining the style and feel from the television series, a difficult feat to achieve. The new backgrounds and character designs are gorgeous, and if there was 3d done on the project, it didn’t show.

The new characters are memorable, but their line reads don’t have the same magic that the regular cast has. Neptune’s daughter, voiced by Scarlett Johansson, feels flat and doesn’t seem to really interact with the primary cast until the film nears its end. However, these new characters come at a cost. As is often the case with animated films, the secondary characters are largely MIA throughout the film. Fans of Mr. Krabs, Sandy Cheeks, or even Squidward will largely be disappointed.

The ending descends into the depths of the bizarre. What started as a beautiful buddy adventure pic falls into the utterly outlandish, including the obligatory Spongebob rock sequence and more than a few disturbing (but G-rated) up close shots of David Hasselhoff. The theme of the film, that kids are important, is repeated more and more as the film nears its end. While a bit over the top, it’s a positive message for kids and helps to move the plot forward.

The video on the DVD, presented in the original widescreen format, is clean and the sound is acceptable. There are a few featurettes on the disc, but nothing that spectacular or memorable. While fans might pine for a more full-featured special edition, the disc has comparable special features as though available on the TV series discs.

Despite the film’s shortcomings, it was still a fast and enjoyable 90 minute ride. Fans of the series will love it, and those with children will find the film surprisingly enjoyable. It stands admirably well as a companion to the original two or three seasons of the series.

Buy The Spongebob Squarepants Movie DVD at Amazon.com.

molrak posted an image:

See It’s BeardMan! Typical Daft Face on flickr.

molrak posted an image:

See It’s BeardMan! Rightside #2 on flickr.

molrak posted an image:

See It’s BeardMan! Leftside #2 on flickr.

molrak posted an image:

See It’s BeardMan! UpBeard Shot on flickr.