A Collection of Bits

I wanted to do a quick post to show everybody what I've been up to in a professional capacity for the last month or two. I've had some amount of leftover Pixelfab work flowing in, so here are a few stills from some clients:

This one's a style mock-up for an animation of a blown-apart view of an appliance. I think I'll render an animation out like this in full even if I don't end up doing it for work, just because it looks cool and it would be a good portfolio piece. Click it to see it embiggened.

This one's a (still of a) seamlessly-looping background video for an interactive Flash overlay.

And another animated background video, complete with lens flares and Star Trek Generations-esque energy ribbons. Take THAT one to the Nexus, Shatner!


And here are some panoramas I took by myself and with Karl. I know I'm switching up my already-confusing top-bottom image labeling system, but deal with it. Again, click on the images to see them in their full web-sized glory.

The originals are photomerges of huge DNG files, so each file is something around a gig a pop. I'll send them to you if you really want them.

I worked up a bunch of weird stuff like this too for a proposal:

And my favorite:

Oh, and I worked on some Particulates again for the first time in over a year. Just so you know. Let me move and get a job, and probably prepare five or so comics in advance as a bugger, and then we'll see about doing a pretty serious restart of the comic. In case you don't know about Particulates, it lives in a temporary hiatus here: http://www.particulatescomics.com/index.php?i=65
My goal is to use it as a my cool-down design project, which I'd do with a glass of wine and some nachos on cool summer nights after all of the main tasks of the day (work, animation projects, socializing) were done. Maybe one a week? That seems like a pretty low goal. We'll see. I'm not going to make any promises I can't keep.

Hell, yes I am. I'll start Particulates again after I move and it will be awesome, just like everything else I do in life. You're gonna love it.

"That's a piecrust promise. Easily made, easily broken." -Mary Poppins

Updates? Updates!

Last week I moved out of my apartment that I've lived in in NoDa for something like four years. My folks helped me move stuff to their basement in South Charlotte over a couple of days, my landlord's husband checked the place out and said I was a fantastic tenant, and then I spent one last official evening in NoDa. My shower curtains were gone, so I saw it as the perfect opportunity to take the first and only bath I've taken in that apartment (and probably in a decade), with The Swiss Army Romance blasting from my phone. I've vowed to take many, many more of these baths. I had eight Yueng-Lings and half a pony keg in my fridge left over from Sean's visit that I took, along with Josh, down to my friends Chris and Krista's place to watch the RiffTrax to The Room. I understand what people say about that movie now. I understand completely. Finished it all off with a couple hours' reading at Amelie's, and then I came back to the flat around 1:30am, packed up my computer and the data server, walked around a little, said goodbye to the place, turned off the lights, and left with A Favor House Atlantic blasting and NoDa fading away in the glow of my taillights.

Here are a few pics from the move. The first is probably the saddest picture. It's the magnets left on the fridge after I took down all sorts of postcards, pictures, and a whole lot of other shit that really means a lot to me.

Yes, I took the magnets off and packed them right after I took the picture. I didn't leave them there.

This is what I was left with at the end:

My laptop sitting atop my company's data server. How incredibly representative of a large percentage of my life in Charlotte since graduating. Next up is the moments-before-final-carry-out-of-things shot.

I don't really miss the apartment, since it and I had good years and it was our time. But the pics of it empty like this sure as hell make me miss the times I had with people here. So One Long Infinite High-Five for everybody who made this The Place To Be.

Next up: a Roast Beef sandwich signed by Chris Onstad in Austin, Texas. Thanks to Scott and Cara from Austin and My Life for this wonderful treasure. There was no place for it and it really has to stay in a freezer, so I said a long goodbye to it, caressed it a bit, and tossed it in the trash like any decent sandwich. In hindsight, I probably should have thrown it onto a roof or at a train or something. Ah, well. I plan to keep this photograph of it in my next freezer and then hopefully get Onstad to sign that someday. Maybe I'll even put it between the layers of a NEW sandwich!

This last picture has become pretty representative of my life at home. It's one of my mom's old coffee mugs that I've now claimed as my own.

I use it for my breakfast coffees and my stay-up-too-late coffees. It is wonderful. My folks are great too and I'm forever indebted to them for giving me a place to stay in these uncertain times. I wish my sister was here right now to complete the picture, but we'll work that out in due time.

In less sentimental news, I've officially resumed the Craigslist apartment hunt, the job hunt (submitted a NOTABLE application yesterday), and I'm heading up to NYC sometime around Sunday or Monday to stay with a friend for a week and see as many apartments as humanly possible. Perhaps I can somehow line up last-second job interviews for that week too, eh? I started a couple of new design things recently too, so I'll stick those on the 'Nets soon when they're finished. I'm getting beers with some dudes tonight, so it'll have to wait.

"The family - that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to." -Dodie Smith