This is why I didn't blog today.
Here's Martin Van Buren:
I think I need a new digtal camera. I might buy one...they're sort of a life essential. Or wait! Maybe not. See, my issue was my battery, mostly: it only holds a charge for a few hours. Of course, I'm not so stupid as to not attempt to solve this problem by buying a replacement battery, which I did. However, when I tried charging it a week ago, it didn't work -- instead of glowing solid red to indicate a charging battery, the indicator light flashed red and green, which told me the battery was incompatible. But now, this morning, I try it again and it seems to be working, so maybe I don't need a new camera after all. Whatever.
Well, I still sort of do -- often I see a darkened band towards the top of images, both on the camera screen and the image file. So, that's not good. But sometimes it doesn't seem to be there or maybe just varies a lot in its darkness, and even if it is noticably present I can trim it off with Photoshop. I'm just using my camera, which is close to 10 years old, for my own entertainment purposes, and don't need top quality, shiny equipment; I'm not Steve Jobs. Har.
A weird thing is starting to happen to my appetite: I'm not getting hungry enough to satisfy my emotional food needs -- I want to be eating and enjoying it, but I'm not hungry enough for that to happen. I think this might mean I need to exercise more. Eating when hungry is such a nice sensation that I'm sort of addicted to it now. I think this is a good thing, but it's still frustrating.
I need to put a Flash mp3 player on my sound page that I'm happy with. I might use this one if I can get the multi-file version of it to work, or I might just look for another. Right now, there's one installed on it that looks stupid and restricts the list of files to a tiny scrolling window. At some point I'll do something about it, but not tonight. I hate struggling to make computer shit work.
I guess my camera is healthy after all, at least at the moment. I don't understand these types of problems, characterized by intermittent symptoms. They seem to occur all the time, with technology (cars, computers, etc). Complexity sucks. As you can see, I'm not having any problems with the dark band towards the top of those photos. I like these low-light tripod shots, where the shutter stays open for 1 second or so. I also applied some adjustments to the bright, contrast, and color. Orangy goodness.
Dis wat I eet:
I sort of hope there's some kind of natural disaster or 2012 end-of-the-world scenario soon.
There. Now that that's done, I can write more relaxedly, because I know that I've done my duty and contributed something to my blog according to its proscribed format.
So now, I guess, is the time of reckoning for the mediocre. When growth is down and hiring is mostly frozen, the people who suffer most are the ones without any "real" skills -- those with degrees in psychology, English, history, etc, or without any degree at all (coupled with no ability to milk a cow, change a tire, etc). In a good economy these people get hired, with the hopes of training them on-the-job and/or as some kind of merciful welfare, and they can make ends meet. But in a bad economy, they constitute the fat that gets trimmed.
I don't exactly include art in that group because art is a skill -- it's a real thing, that artists know how to do (or at least, they're willing to do it, whether they "know how" or not). It's sort of peripheral that what artists produce isn't valued enough to earn the vast majority of them a living. There's plenty of good art out there to buy if you want to spend your money that way -- the market can't accept more artists unless they're really good, and unless they make objects that fit into a livign room and don't clash with the pointsettias. This is fine. Whatever. This is to say nothing of artist-for-hire positions -- commision-based work and just "working a job" as a graphic designer, animator, video game artist, etc, where you give up the self-direction of your creative output in exchange for pay.
In Canada there's the option of applying for grants and earning a living that way, but what kind of sociopath does that? Also, it's pretty hard, from what I understand; you have to "know people" (i.e., schmooze in the right circles, wear the right berets, etc).
I had a thought recently (haha): although it may not be good for employment prosects in a direct way, an art degree is good for taking away that "must work in an office" sort of snobbery, while allowing you to maintain some of the self esteem and social status that comes with academic credentials; an MFA is like a license to work as a garbageman and still hold on to some modicum of ego. That said, it's still uncool to work at McDonalds.
I'm not a very good artist, and this was obvious at school. No one wanted to say anything, though, because of Postmodernism and just because it's not polite. I'm mostly not a good artist because I don't enjoy making art as much as most "artists", nor do I appreciate art as much. The last thing I really got into and felt as though I put enough time into was my IKINYA 5000 animation.
I think I need to do more of them, and forget about this artsy grad school crap. Well, it's not crap -- I saw it done really well by some people. It's just not for me -- I don't fit into that world, creatively. The only thing I like about it is that it's a lot easier, which is a telling and obvious sign that I "don't get it." I need to make the kind of work that I am able to put a lot into, rather than "trying to make art." A prof once told me that I get hung up on "trying to make art," and I think he hit the nail on the head.
Why can't I have any good experiences? What's wrong with me?
I need to make more animations. It combines storytelling, drawing, music, and some digital masturbation: all things I enjoy and am good at. Well, I don't actually know about storytelling. Maybe.
Thought I'd play a bit more with scribbling and different zoom levels, and then more with weird color contrast that don't really "work."
My blog is becoming more customized. Thanks to Randy Baldwin, my archives are now generated with one line of bash/awk, so I no longer have to update them by hand. Here's that line of code:
$(/bin/ls -r [0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9].html | awk '{printf("<a href=\"%s\">%s</a>\n",$0,substr($0,1,4));}')
The first part is relatively straightforward, and works just like the simple script on index.html that, when executed, dumps the most recently posted blog page into itself: list those files in /blog/ that correspond to a ####.html pattern, in reverse alphabetical order. Then, this list is piped (using the pipe character, or "|") into AWK, a sophisticated text manipulation tool built into UNIX that happens to be Turing-complete ("a real, live, programming language").
AWK (its name derived from the initials of its creators) looks a lot like the Perl language's more obfucated bits. In fact, Perl was inspired by AWK.
The task of everything after the | is to turn a listed file (like 0001.html) into a hyperlink. So, it prints out the necessary html, followed by %s which as far as I can tell just means "the given string" (what's been piped into AWK). As you can see, there are two instances of %s (one for the link's display, and one for the link's content). After the comma, AWK specifies how these instances of %s are to be treated: in the first case, $0 tells AWK to print out the string verbatim. Then, the string is altered to strip off the ".html" with various numbers and symbols (I don't quite follow what's going on there, to be honest).
It would be really nice to know this stuff. Unfortunately I am a bit learning-disabled, so here is some more pixel art instead:
Have you ever noticed that most of Canada and the United States looks the same? I dropped the little orange Google Streetview man in a few random locations near large-to-middling cities, and the visual results are overwhelmingly identical: a cul-de-sac or avenue named something like "Birdsong Terrace," featuring lawns and houses and cars and driveways. It's a little disheartening, for someone who's dreamed of "seeing the world," to learn that "the world" might not really be worth seeing.
Of course, there are exceptions that prove the rule: cities like New York and Montreal look nice and varied and interesting, when you virtually tour them. But those areas constitute a tiny minority. I'm forced to the conclusion that most of northern North America is a Stepford Purgatory.
In other news, I'm fantasizing about a way of generating my archives. A script would just list the contents of /blog/ and then generate, from every ####.html file it found, a link to it, ideally without breaking the current format of index.html. It should be totally doable -- I just don't know how to do it. Sort of frustrating. That's what I get for not being a programmer, though.