So, since the last post... nothing has changed so far. Well... Nita is getting pissed that nothing has changed. I guess THAT changed a little... if that counts as change.
I have reached the decision (for good or ill) that I have to let the house go into foreclosure. I've come to grips with it. I don't think I ever really cared about my credit... but for some reason I've avoided it all along. It's weird... like walking along a slow river. You want to jump in and just do it, but some part of your mind is thinking, "You have NO idea what's in there, don't be an idiot". After awhile you do one of three things: Leave the river, go in slow and test it out, or say To hell with it and jump in. Sometimes the second one's not an option...
So, the house will go into foreclosure. I'm going to tell her today, she needs to know how I'm going to do this. I can't just keep giving half my paycheck away. A third is enough, thank you.
On the positive side, I saw Avatar yesterday. I took Jake and Nita and Jenny and Damian. It was an incredible thing to watch... the dawning of a new era in film making. The CG characters are amazing. Can you still tell the CG from the "real" stuff? Yea of course... we're not quite there yet. But the stuff was incredible... it's so close it should scare actors. They did it by mapping real people, actors and actresses, using computers and digital suits to capture motion and facial expressions, which were digitized by computer. The "world" was incredibly detailed, teeming with life, details that would have been missed by earlier attempts were all there... levels of detail that should have taken tears to generate by computer. Now it's down to two years to make the movie... by this time next year it will be a year... after that, they'll start thinking about how to save the facial data and body movement information so the computer can generate CG avatars without "real" actors.
Make no mistake... if you see this movie, you are watching something that will change film-making the way The Matrix did, only moreso. The Matrix gave film makers a new way to view actors and new ways to create scenes... new ways for the audience to look at what's happening in the mind of the director. Avatar gives film-makers a new way to make ACTORS, and a way to bring levels of creativity to screen that has never been possible. The possibility for audiences to see almost directly into the mind of the director.
Anyway... that was a bright spot in the last couple weeks. Don't get me wrong, there have been a lot of them. But christmas is... stressful for me. Actually that doesn't begin to say what the season is like for me, but I don't feel like typing it all out right now. Maybe tomorrow I'll do a lil blog on what christmas means to me... and what I think it means to the American public... and how all that affects my rather fragile psyche.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Things to change
Well... while I'm writing...
I need to change the fucking issues with Robin. She's been living off me since the separation, with no sign of that changing. She's simply content to make it look like she's doing something about it, then do nothing and wait to see if I'll give more money to keep her afloat. Also, the way she cares for Jacob sucks. Simply put... it fucking sucks. Any child that goes to tears at the thought of "going home" has some serious issues to work out.
I have started the changes in the last few days... she doesn't know yet how deeply things are going to change in the next month. Sometime VERY soon I'm going to finish the divorce. I say "I am going to" because she has no incentive to do a damn thing. I, however, and fucking sick of pussy-footing around.
So, I'm asking her for the information she says she has about selling the house, and taking her to task for a few things she's told Jacob. I'm going to look into actually getting the thing on the market in the next week, unless she can show me that she's really doing something.
She's told Jacob that she's looking into a refinance that will be low enough that she can afford the mortgage... which I believe is BULLSHIT. We'll see though... If she can't provide me some kind of information about that in the next few days, I'm going to have the damn house put on the market myself. She can live in whatever happy place she wants... but I'm not paying half the mortgage for a place I don't live, just so she can sponge off me for as long as possible... I've given enough to that marriage... it's over now, and the shit like that is going to end too.
It all just needs to CHANGE.
I need to change the fucking issues with Robin. She's been living off me since the separation, with no sign of that changing. She's simply content to make it look like she's doing something about it, then do nothing and wait to see if I'll give more money to keep her afloat. Also, the way she cares for Jacob sucks. Simply put... it fucking sucks. Any child that goes to tears at the thought of "going home" has some serious issues to work out.
I have started the changes in the last few days... she doesn't know yet how deeply things are going to change in the next month. Sometime VERY soon I'm going to finish the divorce. I say "I am going to" because she has no incentive to do a damn thing. I, however, and fucking sick of pussy-footing around.
So, I'm asking her for the information she says she has about selling the house, and taking her to task for a few things she's told Jacob. I'm going to look into actually getting the thing on the market in the next week, unless she can show me that she's really doing something.
She's told Jacob that she's looking into a refinance that will be low enough that she can afford the mortgage... which I believe is BULLSHIT. We'll see though... If she can't provide me some kind of information about that in the next few days, I'm going to have the damn house put on the market myself. She can live in whatever happy place she wants... but I'm not paying half the mortgage for a place I don't live, just so she can sponge off me for as long as possible... I've given enough to that marriage... it's over now, and the shit like that is going to end too.
It all just needs to CHANGE.
Art
I have this t-shirt that says "Art is one of the few things left worth doing" ... and another that says "Go to your studio and make something". Sadly, I have done VERY very little of that lately, and it's wearing heavily on me.
In the last week I sat down and made two drawings... one called "Bad Mood" and onc called "Out Of The Darkness". The first started out with the intent of being something light hearted... but as usually happens, what comes out on the paper is not under my control. What appears there is a combination of my state of mind, and the particular spirit that speaks to me that day... And since I was in a particularly bad mood and had just bitched at my girlfriends kids at the dinner table... well, what came out was a bust of a horned, 4-eyed, black demon. Really pretty good stuff... the shading was quite good. But not what I expected. The second was what I intended... but as often happens when I direct the pencil, the quality was not as good. "Out Of The Darkness" is a fairy coming through the page and stepping from the "dark side" of the page onto the "light side". It's not bad, but it reminded me that I need practice... the head is a little too large, the legs a little too short... and I never did really get the hang of hands.
I guess both of them reminded me of that... looking at "Bad Mood", the horns aren't quite symmetrical (yea yea... but the left horn starts at the wrong point of the head, makes it look completely off.... IMHO). The eyes don't sit quite right for me... and there's a thing kind of like gills on the visible side of the head (it's a 3/4 profile) that I know doesn't belong there. It fits ok... it just felt like a cop-out when I drew it... as if I couldn't quite see what really belonged there.
It's a strange feeling... but lately I've had the feeling that there are things in my head that need to be drawn. Not so much that I feel like drawing... which I do, but that's different.... more that I haven't been drawing in a long time, and there are things in there that need to be put on paper. Like they've been collecting up in the cobwebs or something. I dunno... like I said, it's a strange feeling.
A friend of mine asked me to do a drawing for her, a phoenix. It should be interesting... Controlling what goes to paper is not always the most productive for me, and color is generally not my friend. I've been working a lot in pencil lately... single color, penned over with extra-fine point sharpie afterward. That seems to work best for me, seems to flow most naturally. But hey, I need to work with pencil and paper more... and maybe this will help some. I figure it shouldn't take more than three tries... of course that assumes that I have time to start it. Maybe Thursday...
I'll try and scan the other two and post them!
In the last week I sat down and made two drawings... one called "Bad Mood" and onc called "Out Of The Darkness". The first started out with the intent of being something light hearted... but as usually happens, what comes out on the paper is not under my control. What appears there is a combination of my state of mind, and the particular spirit that speaks to me that day... And since I was in a particularly bad mood and had just bitched at my girlfriends kids at the dinner table... well, what came out was a bust of a horned, 4-eyed, black demon. Really pretty good stuff... the shading was quite good. But not what I expected. The second was what I intended... but as often happens when I direct the pencil, the quality was not as good. "Out Of The Darkness" is a fairy coming through the page and stepping from the "dark side" of the page onto the "light side". It's not bad, but it reminded me that I need practice... the head is a little too large, the legs a little too short... and I never did really get the hang of hands.
I guess both of them reminded me of that... looking at "Bad Mood", the horns aren't quite symmetrical (yea yea... but the left horn starts at the wrong point of the head, makes it look completely off.... IMHO). The eyes don't sit quite right for me... and there's a thing kind of like gills on the visible side of the head (it's a 3/4 profile) that I know doesn't belong there. It fits ok... it just felt like a cop-out when I drew it... as if I couldn't quite see what really belonged there.
It's a strange feeling... but lately I've had the feeling that there are things in my head that need to be drawn. Not so much that I feel like drawing... which I do, but that's different.... more that I haven't been drawing in a long time, and there are things in there that need to be put on paper. Like they've been collecting up in the cobwebs or something. I dunno... like I said, it's a strange feeling.
A friend of mine asked me to do a drawing for her, a phoenix. It should be interesting... Controlling what goes to paper is not always the most productive for me, and color is generally not my friend. I've been working a lot in pencil lately... single color, penned over with extra-fine point sharpie afterward. That seems to work best for me, seems to flow most naturally. But hey, I need to work with pencil and paper more... and maybe this will help some. I figure it shouldn't take more than three tries... of course that assumes that I have time to start it. Maybe Thursday...
I'll try and scan the other two and post them!
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
On work...
There was a time I enjoyed this.
Sitting at a computer, working on code... numbers and letter floating in virtual space, creating a reality within an electronic universe. Even a tiny little reality that does nothing but print a few words... I have control over the little electronic universe in there, I can make power conform to my requirements. I can take cycles from the system, conform them to my will, and just for an instant I can make change the flow and make SOMETHING from random energy and very basic controlled flow of commands between hardware and simple software. Just for that instant, SOMETHING exists that is purely mine.
The more time I spent, the more complex my SOMETHING became. Adding more and more to it, until it almost takes on a life of it's own. hundreds and thousands of commands, and more... complicated decision processing... sucking data in from users and from across the ether... filtering and examining data, and pouring it back out again... to users and files and back across the ether. Talking to other programs... other people's little universes in which they control the power and the data... making my data conform to their needs, and vice verse... to make a system work smoothly. Creating a system that is more than the sum of it's parts, that can grow as it's used by end users, who's creativity can expand and extend the system by exploiting things that I hadn't even considered. Making my little universe more than I had intended or envisioned....
Then going on to create a new one... and another and another.
There was a time I took pride in my ability to do that.
This is not that time.
Sitting at a computer, working on code... numbers and letter floating in virtual space, creating a reality within an electronic universe. Even a tiny little reality that does nothing but print a few words... I have control over the little electronic universe in there, I can make power conform to my requirements. I can take cycles from the system, conform them to my will, and just for an instant I can make change the flow and make SOMETHING from random energy and very basic controlled flow of commands between hardware and simple software. Just for that instant, SOMETHING exists that is purely mine.
The more time I spent, the more complex my SOMETHING became. Adding more and more to it, until it almost takes on a life of it's own. hundreds and thousands of commands, and more... complicated decision processing... sucking data in from users and from across the ether... filtering and examining data, and pouring it back out again... to users and files and back across the ether. Talking to other programs... other people's little universes in which they control the power and the data... making my data conform to their needs, and vice verse... to make a system work smoothly. Creating a system that is more than the sum of it's parts, that can grow as it's used by end users, who's creativity can expand and extend the system by exploiting things that I hadn't even considered. Making my little universe more than I had intended or envisioned....
Then going on to create a new one... and another and another.
There was a time I took pride in my ability to do that.
This is not that time.
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