This past Friday I attended Front-End Design Conference in St. Pete, Florida with some fellow sharks [that is, Grooveshark employees]. Front-End was actually my first industry conference, and it was great to meet fellow front-end web developers and designers from Florida, to put a face to this community.
Dan Denney—who created the conference a year ago in order to learn more about design—did a great job of gathering 7 talented speakers. I felt that I took away something from each of the people who presented (collectively, 6 pages of notes), but for the sake of brevity,
I’ll post a few interesting points here under the jump »
An excerpt from Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer. A conversation with the author and his grandmother:
“The worst it got was near the end. A lot of people died right at the end, and I didn’t know if I could make it another day. A farmer, a Russian, God bless him, he saw my condition, and he went into his house and came out with a piece of meat for me.”
“He saved your life.”
“I didn’t eat it.”
“You didn’t eat it?”
“It was pork. I wouldn’t eat pork.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean why?”
“What, because it wasn’t kosher?”
“Of course.”
“But not even to save your life?”
“If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”
Categories: Life, Lit | Tags: ohdang | 2 Comments »
A few days ago, I finally watched Miyazaki’s latest animated film, Ponyo. I’d been stalking it in the university library forever (seems like it took eons to “process” the DVD).
According to the summary on IMDB:
The son of a sailor, 5-year old Sosuke lives a quiet life on an oceanside cliff with his mother Lisa. One fateful day, he finds a beautiful goldfish trapped in a bottle on the beach and upon rescuing her, names her Ponyo. But she is no ordinary goldfish. The daughter of a masterful wizard and a sea goddess, Ponyo uses her father’s magic to transform herself into a young girl and quickly falls in love with Sosuke, but the use of such powerful sorcery causes a dangerous imbalance in the world. As the moon steadily draws nearer to the earth and Ponyo’s father sends the ocean’s mighty waves to find his daughter, the two children embark on an adventure of a lifetime to save the world and fulfill Ponyo’s dreams of becoming human.
I really enjoyed this movie; the cuteness was almost unbearable. The animation style was incredible, as it was truly a layer of multiple techniques—flat color and line-work distinctive of anime moving on top of scenery that looks as though it has been rendered in colored pencil. Ponyo marks the return to all hand-drawn animation for Miyazaki, who said, “hand drawing on paper is the fundamental of animation.” I love that as the rest of the children’s film industry pushes towards CG and 3-D production, some people are preserving the traditional cartoon-esque style of my childhood. I also could appreciate that elements of the story reminded me of the “true” (e.g. not Disney-fied) Little Mermaid story.
The one critique I have is about plot structure. The movie is exciting, the pacing is great, but I felt the conclusion was not all that climatic. The characters seemed to be building a certain moment as crucial, pivotal, but I was surprised by how easily that conflict was resolved. Regardless, I enjoyed this film and would recommend it to any who need to experience a childlike wonder of the world. A warning: you will want to watch some nautical Discovery films after this.
Categories: Films | | 5 Comments »
It seems I have been quite M.I.A. ’round these parts lately. It’s been quite a busy summer, between my internship at Grooveshark, a part-time [design] job, and some freelance work. When it rains it pours, and I’m so grateful for that!
I’m anticipating some new posts on this blog soon, but in the meantime, please mozy on over to my post about ditching perfectionism on Pixxid, a development journal my friend Joe started recently.
The Philadelphia Story is a film about Tracy, a Philadelphian socialite and ex-divorce on the cusp of her second marriage. She is a private woman, and as a pair of reporters from Spy magazine are sent out to dig up her wedding story, hi-jinks ensue. This movie was based off a play, which in turn was based off of the life of Helen Hope Montgomery Scott. I watched this film a little while ago, but I’ve been so busy that I didn’t get around to digitizing the type until tonight (which is in itself, I admit, a rush job).
Spoiler alert! I really enjoyed The Philadelphia Story; it was a nice calm after the march of the insane Kubrick films. However, I was pretty dissatisfied with the resolution—that is, when Tracy remarries C.K. Dexter. I think everyone is rooting for the reporter-slash-little known-author, Mike Connor, and the plot would leave you to believe that Tracy will call it quits on her wedding to George Kittredge (yes folks, that’s three men) for his sake. Imagine my surprise when it’s C.K. Dexter walking her down the aisle in the end of the film. I’m pretty sure I yelled at the screen, “didn’t he hit you in the very beginning?!”
That said, a great film was soured by its all-too-neat ending. I felt that it was the stuff of daydreams from children of divorced parents. After watching The Philadelphia Story, I read on Wikipedia that remarriage films were popular in the 1930s and 1940s. It makes sense that the public would desire happy endings in a decade wracked by war and economic depression.
All in all, a good film as long as you take it with a grain of salt and a pinch of empathy for a war-torn generation.
Categories: Films | Tags: AFI | No Comments »
Finally updated The Self-Sufficient Life with the miracle of natural growth. It’s been awhile since I last tinkered with The SSL, but I have more things to post about since the sentiment to become more independent of corporations has not ceased.
Upcoming posts will include my experiences with giving up my clothes dryer in a teeny apartment, attempts at balcony gardening (which will begin in approx. August), and hopefully building an easel.
If you have any projects that you’d like to see me attempt and then blog about, let me know.
If you need to relax, the best thing you can do for yourself is play this thunderstorm .wav while listening to mellow, ambient instrumental music (such as Explosions in the Sky or Message to Bears). Make sure to turn your iTunes sound slider down half-way so that the noises of the rain are equally matched to the music.
In the process of adding an ask page to my poetry Tumblr, I clicked to allow anonymous questions, and received this pop-up:
Use at your own risk: Anonymity can be fun, but can also bring out the worst in people. Don’t feel bad about disabling anonymous questions if they turn nasty or inappropriate.
It was a small moment, but I’ve never seen a website protect its users in this particular way before. I was actually a bit touched by this tiny slice of honesty and sensitivity in a climate which is—as they point out—often harsh under its cloak of anonymity. I can appreciate Tumblr’s attempt to preserve humanity in a system which unwittingly encourages negative commentary that might not surface in face-to-face interactions.
I have a problem: when I draw, I take too long. Each line must be perfect, each measurement accurate, each shaded curve smooth. When I can’t match the composition on my paper to what is in my head or in the studio arrangement, it’s frustrating.
I’m learning though that it is not always essential for an illustration to be entirely accurate, and that actually, the drawings with the most charm and personality tend to be the ones with thrown proportions or shaky lines or generalized forms. Drawings that are created to look exactly realistic are amazing, but can sometimes read as cold or clinical, and don’t hold my attention for very long.
To that end, I took the time to doodle something tonight that would be neither accurate nor realistic. I did not edit out any erasures or stray marks. I scribbled it and posted it here, and it feels good to relinquish control and just make.
Categories: Art | Tags: doodle | 3 Comments »
I’ve been holding off on posting about this one because I wasn’t exactly sure what I thought about it. A Clockwork Orange features Alex, a Beethoven fan-boy teen gang leader who wreaks havoc on his dystopian English town. When a night of mischief goes too far and Alex accidentally (or maybe not) kills a woman with her phallic statue, Alex finds himself in prison. In the penitentiary, Alex hears about a procedure that would “cure” him of his evil deeds, a procedure which would allow him to leave a free man…
On the one hand, this film is horribly grotesque, and I am way too Middle America for the violent imagery. However, the film also gives an interesting insight into teen gang violence, and how society reacts to wayward citizens (which is, admittedly, protracted in the dystopian setting). The strange thing is that despite my hatred of Alex and his band of “droogs,” I can’t help but feel a strange sympathy for him at certain moments of the film. What I thought particularly interesting as well was the prison chaplain character. Religious figures in secular films are often depicted as evil, hypocritical, or deluded; in A Clockwork Orange, however, the chaplain holds to the belief that men should have and harness the power of free choice. I could appreciate that deviation from cinema’s cliche character sketches, and it was one of the saving points of this bizarre film.
An aside: I also meant to post tonight on The Godfather, but 10 minutes before the ending, the VHS I rented from the university library gave out. Not to fear: the movie is mainstream enough for a friend to own it, so I will eventually be able to follow up on that film. Sometime this weekend I will also be posting on The Philadelphia Story, so stay tuned.
Categories: Design, Films | Tags: AFI | 4 Comments »