Hot today. Full-scale summer hot. Not brutally oppressive, not yet; that’s for August. But when there’s a good twenty degree difference between outside and outside, you don’t stay out much.

Which is a shame. If I were still a kid, I’d love this weather. You can work up a good sweat when it’s hot. Run around, chase a ball, play in a creek, and just let yourself get soaked with sweat. You don’t care so much about comfort when you’re eight.

It was a good day at work. Found out that there were some problems with the data resulting from my scripts, but that it’s all due to problems in the original data, not my script. So I’ve washed my hands of that.

I also feel good because I have a new short story in second draft form, and I dusted off an old one and tweaked it, and I think it’s worth sending out there. I’ll probably give them both to the writer’s group soon.

So, a productive day. Now I’m torn between diving into Grave Thoughts, my next comic, or wandering the neighborhood with my camera and an open eye. It’s a good choice to have.

A grey, drizzly, London-by-Foglight morning. I felt subdued as I drove in to work, my radio silent in deference to this week’s Media Fast.

Ah! The Media Fast. This is my second in as many years. I spend a week avoiding all broadcast media: TV, DVDs, movies, newspapers, magazines, books, the world wide web, and podcasts.

By the end of the week, I want to continue it forever. I feel so free and focused when I haven’t been subjected to input. And then the first book afterwards: Wow. It’s an intense experience.

A quiet day of heat and rain. It began with a jog in the dense mugginess of a D.C. area summer. A few clouds provided scant, thin cover for the sun. But they muscled in and eventually obliterated it. By mid-afternoon, I was back from church and my parents had come over with the dogs, and thunder grumbled in the distance like a worried dog.

Then, rain! Sheets and torrents. Bits of hail, too. It was a brief tantrum, though, followed by several hours of steady rain. My parents ducked through the downpour around dinner time, I ate some melon and bread, and made some strawberry candies in between loads of laundry.

And now, to bed. But not before my hard candy recipe:

Put two cups sugar, 3/4 cup water, and 2/3 cup light corn syrup in a small pan. Put the pan on the stovetop, and turn the burner to half power (3 out of 6, 5 out of 10, or whatever). Put in a candy or probe thermometer.

When the thermometer reads 260 degrees, add drops of food coloring until it reaches the desired color. Don’t stir; it’ll be bubbling just fine by itself. Meanwhile, put parchment paper in a rimmed baking sheet and spray with cooking spray (the parchment paper isn’t strictly necessary, but makes it much easier than without it).

When the thermometer reads 280 degrees, add 1 tsp flavoring. You can use an extracts or a flavored oil. Lemon extract is a good start. Again, don’t stir.

When the thermometer reads 300 degrees, remove from heat and pour into the prepared baking sheet. If you can, put the sheet on a wire rack. Immediately rinse the thermometer and pan in scalding hot water. The candy should melt out in a few minutes.

Touch the candy occasionally. When pressing it no longer leaves an indentation (unless you shove really hard), put the candy on a cutting board and cut into squares. It should still be somewhat soft. Don’t wait until it fully hardens, because then you’ll have to just shatter the entire thing (as I had to with my strawberry candies tonight).

Wrap each square in rectangles of wax paper. You should be able to put it in the center, wrap the paper around, then twist each end twice to seal it off nicely. Parchment paper can substitute, but it’s thicker and harder to fold and twist.

By the way, anyone have any ideas on what I could use to make the candies white (not clear)?

This morning, a trip to the farmer’s market. In My Neighbor Totoro, Satsuki compares her neighbor’s vegetable garden to “a mountain of treasure.” It’s a childish, overwrought sentiment, but when confronted with thousands of vegetables in a rainbow of deep, rich color, I have to agree.

So, I came home with several plastic bags of apples, tomatoes, and a watermelon. And that surprises me—all the vendors at this market use plastic bags. Why not paper? Especially since most folks are buying small quantities.

Anyway. Back home, I felt culinarily inspired (no doubt due to rewatching Ratatouille). So I made a pizza, prepared and refrigerated some cookie dough, dumped some beans in the crock pot for baked beans, and set up my bread machine to make ciabatta for Guy’s Night Out tonight. And washed a lot of dishes.

Then, Guy’s Night Out. I was tight-lipped about the films I’d picked for tonight, which fueled some fun curiosity. I didn’t tell them anything until I played the first disc, at which I announced, “One important thing to do: Turn off your brain.“

Then we watched The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension. If you’ve never seen it, I’m sorry; I can’t describe it. I literally can’t do it justice. It’s weird, and fun, and truly adventurous, and wildly imaginative. Perfect for GNO.

Then upstairs for ice cream and apple pie, and back downstairs for the final film of the night: The Legend of Drunken Master. Arguably Jackie Chan’s best film. Certainly some of his best fight scenes. Everyone seemed to love both films (there were a lot of “Ooof”s and “Woah”s).

And now, home, after driving beneath an arcing light show of royal gold and purple lightning, the clouds a neutral curtain backdrop to Thor’s bunraku.

I’ve been getting mediocre, bland, cheap-American-beer sleep all week. I’ve been getting up late as a result, which means no time to exercise in the morning. So I’ll get in a brisk walk here and there, but nothing really solid. Which may explain my mediocre sleep.

Plus, it’s been hot. Well, duh; it’s late July. But today’s been hot and muggy in a way that D.C. natives love to complain about. Nothing’s quite like standing outside the Smithsonian in damp heat, the sun radiating off the marble and concrete, knee-deep in excited schoolkids. Ugh.

I left work early today to attend a Toastmasters meeting. This is my second time at a Toastmasters event; the first was at a small club that couldn’t really find members; this is a larger club (about six regular members) that’s been going for months. Good people, interesting topics, and some really great speeches. I’m looking forward to it.

Why am I going to Toastmasters? As I told them:

1. Tom Peters told me to.
2. As I read about great people, I keep reading their recommendations to join Toastmasters.
3. Since I’m teaching, I want to be really good at speaking in public.

So, that was fun. Then, for my weekly “recharging the creative batteries” time, I saw Ratatouille again. I enjoyed it at least as much as the first time I saw it. Great animation.

And now, tonight, I contemplate how much I’ve enjoyed keeping my celphone off all day. I really do want to pull myself further off the grid. So, proposed: I will only check blogs and comics once a week. I will only check email once a day, in the early morning. My celphone will remain off except in the evenings, or when I expect a call.

Let’s see how it goes.

Today, I began work in earnest on my new project at RC/STS: RCVA. It’s a desktop, instruments-only flight simulator aimed at small training facilities. We build an application that contains all the panels you’d find on a given aircraft (throttle, airspeed, etc.), and sell it off.

The application development process involves copying a lot of files, running various scripts to build everything together, and lots and lots of fiddling with the instruments to make sure everything works. This is what worries me. I don’t know aircraft. I haven’t spent a lot of time in trainers. My mentor on this project—a great guy named Jonas—assures me that that won’t be a problem; I can ask him for help, and I’ll learn as I go. Still. I don’t like this kind of uncertainty.

So, I spent the day installing and running the tools. Which didn’t work; turns out I need access to a remote folder, which I don’t have access to. So it may be a few days before I can actually build anything. :sigh:

I took a breather around noon and spent an hour with a fellow anime lover, assembling Gundam model kits. If you’ve never had the pleasure, imagine a Lego set that builds a detailed, poseable giant robot. Great fun, and completely absorbing.

Back home. Tired. Lazed around for a bit, then read a bit more of Michael York’s great little book Are My Blinkers Showing, then took care of a few nagging projects: mending a shirt, re-reading notes for a series of Bible messages I’ll be teaching in AWANA this year, putting up a recycle bin; that sort of thing.

Oh. Recycling. That may surprise a few people. I haven’t recycled up to now; recycling an aluminum can requires more energy that manufacturing one, so I’ve heard. But it’s not just about energy; it’s also about physical resources. I believe Earth has plenty of resources left, but…eh, I’d like to help out a bit.

Plus, I’ve established a goal: one bag of trash a month. The caveat is that I’ll recycle.

Which gets to the real reason I’m recycling: a flyer came in the mail a few days ago, explaining that we can dump everything into one recycle bin and leave it out every Wednesday. No sorting. That’s easy enough to get me to do it. I just need two trash cans. So I set up the recycling one, and I’m good to go.

But will I keep it up?

And I’m back. And I’m exhausted. I had a great weekend with Saalon and Nick at Otakon; the con is always much more fun with friends.

We had a pretty standard experience. Watched some anime, bought some fun stuff at the dealer’s room (little figurines, Gundam model kits, bags, etc.), and went to a few panels. Watched a bunch of drunk folks outside the hotel scream, “I’m at Otakon!” at 2:00 A.M.

A fun weekend, all around. But I’m very glad to be home.

Leaving today for Otakon. Probably won’t blog again until at least Sunday. Do something really cool this weekend, okay?

Just finished watching The Last Unicorn for the first time.

I know several people who love this film. They all saw it first when they were kids. And I think that explains their love. I just don’t think it’s a great film.

Why? Well, I’m no big fan of America’s music; it’s okay, but it’s just okay. The voice work is superb. The colors are perfect. But the animation…, well, there are several aspects to animation, and it always annoys me when people criticize “the animation” of a piece. So, let’s break that down.

1. First, there’s the aesthetic beauty of the art. Does it look beautiful, or does it look like Star Trek: The Animated Series? Full marks here. I admit I love Rankin-Bass’s designs, but beyond that the backgrounds are lovely and the colors are just right.
2. There’s the sheet count. How many frames of animation (drawings, or sheets) are in an average minute of film? More is better (generally). ”The Last Unicorn has a pretty good sheet count for an animated film. Not Disney, but not Space Ghost.
3. There’s the quality of the drawings. Do the characters look the same in each shot? Are characters facing the right directions when the shot changes? The Last Unicorn is, again, pretty good in this department—there are several places where characters are pointing the wrong direction after a shot change, but generally the characters look the same from shot to shot.
4. Then there’s the realism of the characters. How do people walk? Are they stiff or natural? When a girl puts on a pair of shoes, does she put them on one at a time, mechanically and obviously, or does she just slip them on without thinking? TLU‘s not so hot on this score. Lots of weird gestures. If I’m making a point during conversation, I don’t wave my hand back and forth across my chest. When I walk, my arms aren’t hanging stiff at my side.

So, the animation is mediocre. There are good qualities to it, but much of the physical acting is depressingly stiff.

Then again, most of the Japanese staff went on to make a little film called Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, which is better than this but does suffer from some stiff character movement.

The writing, unsurprisingly, is excellent. Some great lines in there. And while I was annoyed by the trite obviousness of the first two-thirds of the film, I was surprised when it pushed at the fourth wall as the characters debated meta issues like the requirements of the heroic form. Neat, though a bit jarring.

And the end was great (I’m amused that Miyazaki cribbed elements for the ending of Nausicaa).

So, overall, much as I’m sorry to say…I didn’t much like The Last Unicorn.

A small voice warns me of hubris. It whispers in my ear, spinning a memory. I feel the cool air of the movie theater, and the presence of the girl at my side. I was nine years old. I was drinking in the greatest animated experience of my young life: An American Tail. If there’s one reason that I’ve watched hundreds of animated films and series, that’s the reason.

But An American Tail had many, many more flaws than The Last Unicorn. I couldn’t see past them then, and I can’t see past many of them now. That movie formed me.

And so, if this film formed others, who am I to judge too harshly?