Category: General

Dalia forwarded me this opportunity to mentor a child, and I think it would be a really good idea for me right now. In the forward, which was from somebody named Michael, was described a 12 year old girl who wants to learn how to be a cartoonist, specifically manga style. I don’t really do manga, but I went ahead and emailed the contact person (Teresa – “VSB district resource teacher – gifted education”) to find out more info. I got an email this morning:

“She is a talented artist and would like a mentor to show her new techniques in manga such as expressions, clothes and colours. She would like to improve her shading and proportions. If it were possible, she would like to learn about computer programs for colouring and animating. “

I don’t know if I’m the right man for that job. But also in this email:

“L is 11 and in grade 6. Since he was 3 years old he has made a variety of board games – all involving maps, some are historical and some are fantasy. L would like a mentor who enjoys role playing and strategy games so together they could design a game with mythical characters and go though levels or worlds or create a problem solving game that appeals to many types of people. The mentor would keep him on track, test out the games and help produce the game.”

That is perfect for me. And:

“B is 12 and in grade 6. He has visited art museums, tried computer art, has taken art classes and does lots of drawing. He would like his drawings to have better shading, better poses, more action and be less stiff. For his product B wants to draw a detailed fighting scene of a monster. He would like the mentor to help him with drawing styles, poses, lettering (like graffiti), shading or anything involving pencil sketching/drawing.”

Another good match.

Problems: “Two references are needed plus a criminal record check (free).” and I have to fill out some forms. The forms are fine…except I have no experience with “youth.” The criminal record check – no problem. Two references? Who the hell would I put down as references? I guess employers. Anyway – I think I might give this a go and see what happens. Wish me luck.

If anyone wants me to forward them the info for how to be a MENTORRRRR just email me.

Should I?

Finally I can talk about it openly.

I made Yvonne and Anghold calendars for Christmas. I finally got the gifts to them today. Anghold’s was called something to the effect of “Ang Hold’s Super-Fantastic Introduction to Dungeons and Dragons by Way of Toren’s Favourite 1st Edition Monsters 2004 Calendar“. It included staples like the beholder and the mind flayer, but also a couple personal faves like the thought eater and the grell. Both Yvonne and Anghold (independently) commented on the fact that the owlbear looked like a muppet (Sam the American Eagle>), and while Yvonne found most of the horrible monsters (like the umber hulk) “cute”, Ang found the purple worm legitimately scary. Heehee.

Yvonne got an altogether different calendar, called:

The 2-Tone Unsteady Players
presents
Best Loved Scenes From
12 AWKWARD MOMENTS IN HISTORY
a play directed by Cecil M. Frankenberry

So, if you can wrap your brain around this, it’s drawings & text of “awkward” instances in the history of the world, as if they were photos from a play on the subject. There was a cast of five actors, Floyd the Near-Sighted Skeleton, Snowgirl, Ewan O’Possum, Hello Cthulhu & the Clockwork Hippie>, plus the director, who, yes, is the Frankenberry from the cereal (he’s branching out from being a spokesdrawing for General Mills & getting into directing). I got a lot of help for ideas from Stewie, Mr. Tice, Rowan and many posts on various sites & forums, plus rummaging through books on hand. I think my favourite scene is the one in which Captain Oates (of Robert Scott’s doomed Antarctic expedition) committed suicide simply by leaving the tent with the words “I am just going outside, and I may be some time.” Although my favourite drawing is the one where they dress up Hello Cthulhu as the Mars Orbiter that NASA lost* and swung him around the stage on a rope, holding a jiffy pop pan in one tiny hand and some cardboard “solar panels” in the other, while a smoke machine belches the “Martian atmosphere” onto the scene.

*because one team used metric and the other team used imperial.

Smart is sexy, don’t you agree?

I like having friends who are smarter than me. It keeps me on my toes.* It’s actually not that hard to do. Oh, muffin, I have my occassional clever idea here and there, but generally I am akin to a post, smarts-wise. The point is this: I have added a few new co-blogger links to the left. Michael Tice is an old friend who lives in Californ-i-a. He is a Lovecraft fan, is a lot of fun (to my knowledge) and is probably the smartest guy I know. He has a lovely and very talented wife, Rebecca, and I wished I lived closer to them (or vice-versa). Secondly, Janet is someone I’ve never met, and I know through Marlo, and again – smart as a whip.

Also, if you’re looking through comments and somebody’s comment doesn’t make sense because it seems to reference another comment that doesn’t seem to be there – it’s because Kirsten taught me how to delete comments. Mwoo-hahahah. Take that, anonymous posters. That’s right – anonymous posting bothers me that much.

*plus hanging around brainiacs and asking lots of questions is a lot easier than reading those dusty old books.

A Stamos-neutralizing idea!

And I thought it was junk mail. I got a letter from the war amps. Once in a while I throw a couple US dollar bills in an envelope and send it off to them. So when I got something in the mail from them I thought it was just another “got anymore cash for us?” form. But instead it was my address label stickers “order.” The second best part about them is that they’ve got a picture of Astar the Robot on them. The first best part of them is that I forgot that I had put “Cloney McStudent” in the name field when I ordered them, so now I’ve got about 60 address labels for Cloney McStudent at my home address. That had me giggling like an idiot for a full minute. That’s one giggle per label, people! Well worth it.

Lastly:
I thought of another good irony today: I don’t know the origin of the word etymology.

“I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle.”
– Arthur Dent

I’m not excited about anything right now. It sucks. In fact, there are a few things I am dreading. But I want something to be excited about.

Come to me…

(Sorry kids, I’m not usually in this kind of funk. Am I?)

Orange you jealous of my new warmups?

I like everyone at the Sunshine Market except for one lady. She’s the lady who’s always trying to sell everyone lottery tickets and yadda yadda, although I think she gave up trying to sell them on me. Anyway, I bought a large bag of mandarin oranges the other day and she said “why don’t you just buy them in the box”

I said “I like to hand pick them all” instead of what I was thinking, why don’t YOU just buy them in the box?”

She said “are you worried you might get a couple of bad ones in a box?”

“Yes” I replied curtly.

“If you get any bad ones you can bring them back and we’ll exchange them.” she offered.

“That’s nice, but shut up.” I didn’t say.*

“Also, they’re cheaper in the box.” This last statement I didn’t believe, so I checked the prices of the mandarin boxes behind me. The cheapest one was $5.99. I paid about $5.40 for my bag of hand-picked beauties. I took my bag of oranges home and found an empty mandarin box that Stewie had bought several weeks ago. I dumped the oranges into the box – my $5.40 worth of oranges wouldn’t all fit in the $5.99 box – so next time I’m at the Sunshine I can rub that in Mrs. Lottery Ticket’s face at the same time I bring up the fact that they’re out Tootsie rolls still.

When Stewie observed my experiment he told me I can never make fun of him when he does his own kitchen experiments. But really I never make fun of him in the traditional sense – I just look at him like he’s from Io.

*Besides – why would I take the risk of having to haul back some bad oranges to the store when I could just make sure my produce is within acceptable perameters when I buy them? I ask you.

I was planning on working on Yvonne’s belated xmas gift tonight, but instead she called me up practically begging me to come and play Settlers of Catan with her and Ursula. I said I would play Catan if we could also play my game, Conquest Beyond, and there was agreement. I also played a game called Abalone which was pretty good. I barely won that. This also seemed (impromptu-ly) to be the night where I broke my tea-totalling ways. I got a little drunk, just enough to feel it, and just enough to blurt out what I was making Y for xmas. I learned one thing: Pepsi & rum is disgusting. For anyone who doesn’t know, I haven’t been drunk since about 1991. I had a couple tiny tiny sips of a mixed drink in December of 2002 and I have been known to eat chocolates with liquour in them, but otherwise I have not touched a drop of alcohol in about 13 years. It wasn’t that big of a deal, but I probably won’t do it again for a while. I think it would probably only “feel right” in the company of close friends, and in a small group, at that. I would want to be already comfortable before I started drinking. I guess that’s normal, isn’t it? To have a drinking buddy or buddies? I would want to keep pace with who I was with – and I found myself trying to drink (or be drunk) no more or less than Yvonne. Ursula was also drunk to some extent but I wouldn’t had known had she not said so (having met her only 2 nights ago). Anyway, it was fun, and I hope I haven’t disappointed the world by breaking my passive vow of sobriety.

On the other hand, I don’t have to go through the rigamarole of explaining to people why I don’t drink anymore. Because I do! Can I say that? Can I say that I drink now? Or do I say that I am a non-drinker who recently had a few drinks? (Well, I didn’t finish my third one, but I digress.) How often and how much do I have to drink to be able to say that I am not a drinker? How long do I have to go without meat to be a vegetarian? How long do I have to go without smoking to say I’m a non-smoker?

Keep your nights open from January 30 – February 1st because we are going to see The Animation Show at The Ridge. Brought to us by Don Hertzfeldt and Mike Judge. Oh my, yes.

Among the hundred of known extrasolar planets, about 15% are closer than 0.1 astronomical units (AU) [the distance from Earth to the sun] from their parent stars. But there are extremely few detections of planets orbiting in less than 3 days. At this limit the planet HD209458b has been found to have an extended upper atmosphere of escaping hydrogen. This suggests that the so-called hot Jupiters which are close to their parent stars could evaporate. Astronomers estimate the evaporation rate of hydrogen from extrasolar planets in the star vicinity. With high exospheric temperatures, and owing to the tidal forces, planets evaporate through a geometrical blow-off. This may explain the absence of Jupiter mass planets below a critical distance from the stars. Below this critical distance, they infer the existence of a new class of planets made of the residual central core of former hot Jupiters, which they propose to call the “Chthonian” planets. Awesome. [Thanks to Wayne for the info]

Um er ah…

Happy gnu year! It’s 2004. Two Thousand and Four years Anno Domini. Year of our Lord. Not After Death. I wish it was After Death though. Then there would be like a 30 year period between BC and AD that was essentially “null time”. Maybe it would be called DJ – “During Jesus”.

The best part of 2004 (so far) was walking to the bus stop with Yvonne and Rebecca. Not to say that I didn’t have fun at Ursula’s game party – but (a) the conversation wasn’t as good and (b) I didn’t find a ten dollar bill on the ground when I was inside. And also (c) walking in the snow with my boots is fun. And also also (d) the smaller the group, the more comfortable I am. Did anybody see that absolutely terrifying New Years Countdown on FOX that was basically a T&A-rife ad for “American Wedding?” Tasteless.

At the party we played Cranium, Settlers of Catan and Hoopla. I don’t recommend Hoopla, but Cranium was pretty fun. I’m sure everyone who is reading this has played Settlers a million times (I know Mr. Chris has Starfarers of Catan) but it was my first time playing it last night. I am not terribly fond of strategy games. I never really liked Risk or any of those “building an empire” video games. Probably because I’m not very good at them. And I’m impatient. Yeah, Cranium was definitely the most fun game of the night.

Being in group activities like that is interesting because I am fascinated (sometimes) with human interaction (Other times I am dreadfully bored with it): gauging personalities as they come to the fore under different situations; watching how different people react when they’re winning or losing the game; noticing how some people (unconsciously) tuned other people out. I noticed a couple times when Rebecca said something relevant to her team’s game but the only person who seemed to notice was me, and I was on the opposing team. I empathized – that happens to me a lot depending on the group I’m with. Basically I guess I most observed how difficult it is for people to pay attention to one another (myself included of course) but I will be the first one to admit that it is hard to do in a room with more than three people. Apart from all the observing, I had a good time and I found all the new people I met to be genuinely nice and friendly and decent.

Playing these competitive games made me realize how much I like roleplaying games because everybody is working together rather than against one another. But there are times when you want to lay the smackdown on your friends just to show them how awesome you are. Try to take my Scrabble away and I will poke my finger in the general area of your eyes.