Devouring time

I present to you the result of a few nights of boredom.

I guess watching all those animated shorts and the Blender Conference videos did help little in getting me to do something, except that I don’t know what this something is. At least I have an actual finished piece of work made this year. I thought my last rendering was made just a few months ago, but I was very, very wrong. A bit more time and it would’ve been an entire year with no new Blender work. There needs to be a better interval between one finished render and the next.

Now, as for the image to your left … there’s little to explain. I started working on this on Monday, not long after thinking it up. If I could remember the train of thought that led to this image, it would be great. I was in the shower when I thought of it and, unless my memory fails more than the usual, my thoughts probably went from how I’m wasting so much time –and loving it, as Don Adams would say it best– to this strange thing you see here.

Admittedly, organic modeling isn’t my forte … and neither is UV mapping, or compositing, or …

Wait, I don’t think I even have a forte in Blender. Must get one soon.

The render doesn’t fully satisfy me. It’s much improved from the initial concept, but the idea can be executed so much better. Perhaps I’ll make a follow-up someday (The disintegration of the devouring of time?).

Anyway, I have added this new thing to my portfolio, the first update since I redesigned it, or, well … since I changed it from just a showcase of my Blender work into what it is now, at the request of a teacher and others who rolled their eyes when I described the original site’s intention.

That’s all I wanted to show for now. So long, reader(s).

Bottle cap

Like I said before, I have reached the end of my photo folder. To be more specific, the temporary photo folder –where images are stored before being classified and moved to their final location– is now empty, for the first time in months. I think it will be a while before I go out there and make more photos, in part because there aren’t many new places/things around here that are interesting enough to capture.

For your convenience and mine –and because every image photograph can tell a good story–, I’m starting a small experiment, resulting from a short, yet popular post that I made earlier in the year and a bit of night-thinking. All the posts in the series will be marked with the in detail tag (in case it runs long) and, at least for a while, the photos in it will just be some old ones that I’ve not posted here already.

Rather than explaining the gist of it, I’ll just go ahead and write and see if you can figure it out. Don’t tell me what it is, reader(s), as I already know. Here goes, again with the title.

What you see on the left side of the above photo is, as you may have guessed from the title, a bottle cap. You can still see the ridges of it, despite the rust trying its best to destroy this small relic from the past.

See, this cap came from a glass bottle of 7 Up that was opened back in the 1990s. At that time, there was a contest from this brand, and prizes would be given to those who found the specially-marked caps. I don’t recall what the winning markings were supposed to be but, if I recall correctly (because the early ’90s are a bit of a blur to me at this point), this particular cap had the brand’s then-popular mascot, Fido Dido, on the inside of it.

I can’t be sure as to whether this marking meant that I should be given a prize for it or if it was just a one of many such drawings that were present in the non-winning caps. The point is that my young self had the bright idea of dropping the bottle cap in the small space between a wall and a metal plate that’s part of the patio gate lock (the plate and the wall have a hole through which a bolt goes to keep it closed).

If memory serves right, I’ve managed to retrieve that bottle cap a couple of times, just to remind myself what was on the inside of it. Of course, I always returned it to its rightful place, so I could forget about it for years and years, and I can’t recall when I last saw held it in my hand. It has been years, sure, but I’m not sure as to whether it has been a full decade since then.

For now, this small piece of metal that would have normally ended up in a dumpster with all the others, has withstood the test of time, both by preserving the shape it had when it was removed from the bottle, and by staying somewhere in my mind where it is able to make its presence known from time to time.

I generally don’t think of it that much. That would probably make me a crazy person. But, every so often, as I walk to the patio, I’ll look at it and get a glimpse of that day in the last decade of the last century, when I decided to drop a bottle cap … and I’ll keep on walking.

The early holiday season

It already started. Without warning, I found the apartment filled with Christmas ornaments and, most notably, a Christmas tree, or seasonal monochromatic ornamented cone-shaped display, if you prefer to call it that.

It was put up on Sunday morning by my mother and my sister. As in previous years, I missed the chance to help out, this time because I slept in, something that will continue to happen until January (at least).

Comparing the current tree with the one from last year, little seems to have changed. Once again, it is placed in the balcony so the dogs won’t get to it and see it as a colorful toilet. The presents will probably be placed in my nephew’s playpen, just like the last time.

Unlike last year, where I settled for a full shot of the tree, I’ve got close-ups!

To “decorate” the base of it, the strange-eyed bunch returns, arranged in a slightly different way, so as to not bore the camera.

In other news, I’ve continued to delete things from the computer’s hard drive. In one week, I got rid of nearly 10 GB of various things, most of which are animated short films and Blender-related videos that I’ve downloaded over the years. They’re all nice to watch, but they have no use just sitting on the hard drive gathering e-dust.

As much as I like watching Chris Landreth’s Oscar-winning short, Ryan (about Ryan Larkin’s short-lived success as an animator), student work from Gobelins and Supinfocom and old Blender Conference videos, among various other things, the space can be better used, and I’d like to hoard as little as possible, both in the computer and outside of it. I’m watching them all before pressing Delete, in case I learn something new or become inspired. The latter hasn’t happened yet, but here’s hoping …

Aside from the above, nothing much is going on. I cleaned up a bit more last week, asked a classmate to let me know of any free (or cheap) conference or talk that might give me a few of the remaining hours for college, and I’ve taken up drinking a mug of green tea every day, to see if that does anything for my lousy health. There seems to be a bit of improvement from last week, but I don’t know whether it’s the tea or not.

Outside my personal life, this country isn’t getting any better. Changes have been made in the Constitution to benefit those with deep pockets at the expense of those with no pockets, women still have no say on whether they want to keep an unwanted pregnancy –while those who voted to keep this can afford to get abortions performed elsewhere–, the definition of marriage was changed to a union strictly between a man and a woman, destroying the possibility of marriage equality in the near future. Too much influence from the church. To top all that, public access to rivers and beaches might become restricted. Something about the right of private property.

People have been protesting the changes (especially that last one about the beaches), and the motto Esa no es mi Constitución (lit. “That’s not my Constitution”) has been turning up everywhere, from graffiti to stickers. The protesting has died down in the last couple of weeks, though, and the popular news of the week is the murder of Miky Bretón, creator and producer of what was possibly the only drama show currently on Dominican television, Relatos (“Tales”), and probably one of the longest-running. It didn’t follow a set storyline, but instead presented various short stories about crime, rape, drug abuse and things like that, taking place here. Sure, I didn’t watch it, but the man was trying. Bleak future for scripted television here, when the ones who make it happen get, you know … murdered.

Yikes, this post became depressing. The above two paragraphs are nothing like the ones before. I better stop now, before it turns into something that’s just as sad as the local headline news. I should stop bothering to read those.

To end this on a better note, uh … Santa says hi.

Pieces of October

Text goes here.

Nah, I should really throw a quick something to go with the images.

I put a stop to the whole “condensation” series because I no longer had to catch up. Only took me four posts and fifty-five photos to tell all that’s happened since the end of July and until the end of September. I hope I don’t lose track again, or at least not two months’ worth of track.

As is usual with the world, the Christmas ads came early. Not as early as July, as I think has been the case in the past, but starting this current month. October 31st is yet another day for us, as things such as Halloween and Samhain are generally not observed here, so all businesses go straight for the December holiday offers.

My nephew started school yesterday (Tuesday). Well, pre-school. Not sure what level he might fall into, as he is just one year of age. The point is that, with his being at that place for most of the day, not as many schedule adjustments are required in order to take care of him, and I get a bit more alone time, which is good. It’s good because it’s only when I’m alone that I feel like cleaning up (which I did the Sunday before last) or doing a bit of work and I’ll be able to do some things until college starts up again.

Speaking of college, it seems as though I just have to assume that my monograph request will be accepted and I’ll only be informed of anything if there’s something wrong with the request. I was told last month that I should call to check the status of my request and they said that they were still getting those and had not yet begun going through them. At the bottom of the form I had to fill, it says that a list of accepted requests will be published on the web site, so I’m checking it almost every day.

What else goes here … okay. To save me a bit of time, I’ve added most of the web sites that I check every day into Google Reader. I only had a handful of those before but, now that they’re all there and that I can see the number of unread articles, I realize how much time I wasted by visiting them separately, even when there was nothing new. Serious waste.

As I mentioned before, I cleaned up a bit. I was alone in the apartment, and my brother had organized his side of the closet (yeah, we share the room), so I decided to do my part and tidy up my site of the bookshelf. My mother came home as soon as I was about to start, so I gave up on it. She had brought this iced coffee thing that I hadn’t tried before and, besides being incredibly delicious (Droopy liked it, too), it seemed to have given me enough energy and motivation to clean up … one quarter of my side of the bookshelf. Surprisingly, that’s all it took to fill up that huge garbage bag. It was so full of old college work –drawings, paintings, illustrations, even old notebooks that I had recycled from school– that I had no use for that I couldn’t even tie it closed.

In addition to that, I’ve also begun deleting things from the computer’s hard drive. Not random things, because I’ve not gone crazy (yet), but I’m getting rid of things I’ve downloaded over the years and are just gathering digital dust. It’s surprising how much unnecessary junk has accumulated without me caring much, and how I don’t miss them once they’re gone (since I didn’t notice them much, anyway). One can never have enough free hard drive space, and …

Wait, I said I would write a quick something. How little do I know about the “quick somethings” that I write, after more than a hundred posts.

Here are some photographic highlights of my October.

That’s the end of October’s posts, I think, and it also happens to be the end of my photo folder, as that last image is also the newest one worth showing.

I don’t expect much else to happen for the remainder of the month, so I decided to publish this now and continue to sleep through what’s left of it.

Perhaps November will bring along something interesting …

Condensation, part four

Carrying on …

August ended. September began and … there’s just so little to say about it, really.

We celebrated my father’s birthday with an ice cream cake. The same good old ice cream cake we always buy, which tasted exactly the same as the first time we bought one. Hopefully, it’ll never change.

My father had to change some batteries for our backup power. Power outages have become a bit more frequent, so having backup power that lasts a tad longer is a good thing. Not that candlelight is bad, but it’s best to avoid the possibility of fire. There are few places around the apartment where a candle will burn safely.

What else … oh, right. On the 21st, I had to go to college. Not for class, of course, but to apply for re-admission so the system would be open to me for the next –and final– term. Turns out that I don’t need to apply for such a thing because I’m all out of subjects. All I had to do was fill the upper half of a form, applying for a monograph. After that, I walked around a bit to see if anything had changed, and met with some of the people who hang out near the Coffee Store tables area.

Besides all that, and apart from getting a haircut, I stayed at home (I know, surprising). Slept a lot, ate little (but enough) and not much else was done that month.

My mother’s been bothering me about those courses I’m supposed to do, to earn my remaining hours. Turns out that I’ve got less hours than I previously thought. While in college, I asked the lady there if it was possible to know how many hours I had at the moment. She did a quick check and said … 42. Forty-two. Not just the answer to life, the Universe and everything, but also way more hours than I previously guessed. Perhaps they’re just giving them away to those who are close to graduation or something, but the remaining eighteen hours can be covered by just one course, or a few free (or cheap) conferences that take place on campus.

That was September … and October isn’t over yet. Given that there’s a similar level of activity this month, I could sum it up in a post as short as –or shorter than– this one.

However that may work out, reader(s), I leave you with a semi-decent view of a September half-moon.

Until next month time.