Here are a couple of classic clips from Tiny Toons I found on YouTube. I remember watching this when it first aired. It was genius then and it is genius now.

Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnUXZlatV6Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-05xJ5bHmY

Between Kori’s move, my injuries, and various social commitments the past two weeks, I have not been able to focus much on anything else. I haven’t been updating this blog as much as I would like. I’ve barely drawn anything. I’ve only done minimal work on Lightwave. And the college videos are being ignored.

I went to the gym tonight for the first time in probably a month. Now that I’m able to work out again, I’m hoping that my energy levels will even out and I’ll be able to focus more at night on my various personal projects. I already feel a positive difference from this one workout, so hopefully nothing will prevent me from getting back into my workout routine.

Time for bed.

I went to the Pearl Jam show last night at the United Center. The show was fantastic! This is the third time I’ve seen them and all shows have been amazing. This time around, they played for almost three hours! They opened with Release and went on to play half of the Ten album by the time the concert was over, including Black (my favorite song by them) and Porch (one of their greatest live songs, always with an extra long solo in the middle). The also played a few of their most popular B-sides and covers: Yellow Ledbetter, State of Love and Trust, and Baba O’Riley. Other interesting moments: they played part of Open as an intro to another song (I forget which one now), the end of Daughter became a short rendition of W.M.A. that replaced “White Male American” with lyrics about a “white texas son” and the chorus was just “President”, and the encore included lots of Versus songs (Go, Blood and Indifference).

If you ever get a chance to see Pearl Jam live, don’t pass it up. They manage to sound even better live than in studio and they do their best to repay their fans for having to shell out a lot of money for the concert tickets.

I found an interesting program that can generate and edit fractal flames. The program, Apophysis, is open source and free to use. It can generate some very interesting fractal images and is very configurable. I think that it could be a useful tool, as long as it is not too difficult to generate images that meet my needs.

For fun, I tried out the software and generated this image. I didn’t have anything specific in mind, so I just started with an interesting fractal and played around with modifying it. I spent about 10 minutes playing with the software before rendering out this image.

I’ve been doing some drawing and starting to work on a new project that will help me get acquainted with the animation capabilities of LightWave and Mirage, so hopefully I’ll have some new updates in Gallery section soon.

My ankle is starting to get better. I no longer need to hop around, although I am still just shuffling rather than walking. Maybe by the end of tomorrow I’ll just have a limp!

Today I spent a few hours working on the college videos, which I have been neglecting lately. I put up a few new clips and managed to finally get to the end of tape I’ve been working on for a while. The last hour or so of the tape had very little usable footage; the cameraman was too drunk to get many good shots.

Enjoy the new clips, I hope to serve up some more soon.

I’m trapped. Stuck in my condo, unable to leave. Even within my condo, my movements are limited.

Why am I trapped? Because I sprained my ankle last night. Pretty bad, too. Bad enough that I can’t put much body weight on my left leg. Which means that I can’t walk. If I want to move from my couch to my office, for instance, I hop on my right leg over to the other room. And showering last night was a major feat of one-legged gymnastics.

I’ve been icing down my ankle and keeping it elevated whenever I can (hard to do while working on a laptop). I can already tell it has started to slightly heal, but it may be another couple of days before I can even walk to the grocery store across the street.

On a more positive note, here are some funny video links (credits go to Jill and ClunkyRobot):

• A live-action play that acts out the Super Mario Bros. video game
• Stephen Colbert’s keynote speech at the Correspondent Associates Dinner (Part One, Part Two, Part Three)
• The Wes Anderson American Express ad

It’s my last night in Tucson and there is little to report. I’m excited to finally get to sleep in while I’m out here. In order to make all of my morning conference calls, I’ve been waking up before 7am (except for Tuesday, when I was able to sleep until 8).

Tomorrow we’re driving up to Phoenix and exploring ASU. We’ll be staying in a hotel for the night near the airport and then flying back home on Saturday.

It will be nice to get back.

I finished The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons, and now I’m very curious to read the works of John Keats. Both Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion have central and obvious elements related to the English poet, most obviously the fact that the books share the names of poems by Keats. Dan Simmons has two other books set in the same universe that also share names with the poet’s works: Endymion and The Rise of Endymion.

The life of John Keats is a sad one. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was age seven. His brother fell victim to the same illness 14 years later. Three years after that, at the age of 24, he succumbed to the same disease. During his career as a poet, he was savagely criticised by his contemporaries. His last request, out of suffering and personal frustration, was to inscribe only this message on his headstone:

“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

I’ve added a new feature to the gallery that allows registered users of Blogger.com to post comments in the gallery. It works the same way you post to this section of the site.

Tucson is going well. It isn’t very exciting but it is relaxing. I’m almost done with The Fall of Hyperion and at the rate I’m going I’ll probably be done by the end of tomorrow. Plus I had time today to add in the gallery comments feature.

I’m hitting my main work goals this week and I should be on-track to finish everything so I can take a day off Friday to explore Phoenix. Kori is excited to show me around her alma mater, Arizona State University.

I have an early day tomorrow, so I’m going to turn in soon. Maybe after reading another chapter 🙂

This post is coming out of a hotel room in Tucson, AZ, where I’ll be staying for the rest of the week. I flew into Phoenix on Saturday to join Kori during her last week of a 4-week rotation in Tucson.

After flying in on Saturday, we went to a friend’s house in Scottsdale. He was gracious enough to show us around town and offer us place to stay for the night. Actually, it was way more than that; he had dinner cooking for us when we arrived, we had a nice air-mattress to sleep on, he made us breakfast in the morning, and we lounged around his pool for most of the day on Sunday.

After we were finally able to pull ourselves away from our friend’s resort-like home, we made the hour-and-a-half drive to Tucson. I spent the rest of the night relaxing, watching a little TV, and doing some reading (The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons – an excellent book so far, and the first book, Hyperion, was also great). Today was spent working, topped off by a nice sushi dinner with Kori.

I’ll have some photos once I get back to my home computer, which has my camera’s software and cable. While I’m out here I hope to get a few more posts up, maybe work on some details of this site, get some more reading done, do a little drawing, and spend the rest of my free time relaxing.

I think I’ll get started on that last one.