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.

Condensation, part three

August again.

The whole college thing ended, at least for the year, and I was home free. I was put in a situation where I had so little to do and so much time.

Yeah, sure. I updated my work for the graphic design class and e-mailed it to the teacher, but that was it. Nothing else to do. Nyet. Nada. Zilch.

I loved it. After much mental exhaustion caused by the constant worries about delivering works on time, and making sure they were perfect, I would get my much-deserved rest … but I didn’t stop worrying right away. I still had to wait for my grades to be published. I slept the weekend away and was met with the pleasant surprise of having aced all three subjects. The last three college subjects that I would ever have to take.

Speaking of surprises, we gave my mother a surprise birthday party on the 18th. The party was at her workplace. She works at a massage place. Not that kind of massage place, but one where blind people do massage therapy, run by a government board for the visually challenged. I had never been to her workplace before, and had little choice but to go, with her being my mother and all.

She was shocked, for sure, when she saw that friends and family quickly gathered and arranged everything while she had gone away on some errand. I have to admit that I don’t know many blind people, and I felt a bit uneasy at first, sitting across an entire row of them as they laughed and joked around with their friends and co-workers. As always, I was in charge of the camera and, again as always, took me a while to gather the confidence to stand up and randomly aim it at things. The distraction keeps my anxiety down.

The party was just a short-lived gathering and people started leaving shortly after having their appetizers (an odd mix of snack foods with some traditional stuff thrown in) and the cake-cutting part. In the end, I was put in charge of … the cake. There I was, at night, on the front seat of my brother-in-law’s car, with half a cake, still on its big tray. I’m a big fan of seatbelts, but this time I would only count on a few layers of dough covered with icing to break the impact in case of sudden stops.

Thankfully (and to the disappointment of those in the back seat), such a thing never happened. At one point, there was a public transport bus stopped next to us while the usual vehicular chaos gave us a chance. My window was rolled down, and I had a big cake on my lap. Paranoid as I am, I thought one of the passengers looking at me would say something, or spit in my general direction. Then, we started moving again.

That was it … and that’s pretty much it for August. Like I said before, I had little to do and far too much time. Most I did for the rest of the month was grab the camera and make a few shots that, to my eyes, are somewhat interesting.

All right. Run along, now. But, before you go, why not look at that SocialVibe thingy on the right? It’s not a fancy ornament, you know.

Condensation, part two

Carrying on …

Wednesday. The 15th of August. Nighttime.  Fancy, blurry, that-takes-me-back effect goes here.

The final class. Graphic design 9, the last in a long string of classes starting in 2006. End of the saga, like George Lucas couldn’t have done it, and usage of CGI was kept to a minimum.

We each had to create a project proposal for a social advertising campaign, with most themes being about the environment, like in my case. I had to design a campaign for the preservation of national parks and endangered species (flora and fauna). My idea was supposed to be a global thing, but the teacher wanted it (and all other projects) to be just for this country. Bummer, as I would’ve liked to create something non-specific that could apply to any place.

The online information on national parks is rather limited. While Wikipedia has plenty of information about species of any kind, I focused more on protected areas and scientific reserves. My project certainly lacked in the theory aspect because of this, but not in the graphical one. I found a nice amount of info on a few parks and a few species, and those were enough to create designs for banners, billboards, posters, ads for printed media, and even a small magazine-style bulletin for the campaign.

I also had to create the logo for it, from scratch and not based on anything. It contains leaf shapes and the color arrangement of our flag inside one of them. To its right, is the campaign’s name, A greener country. It was also the slogan for it, for radio and TV commercials, which would end with “for a greener country”. Saved me from having to come up with an original slogan, apart from the name.

Before all this, I had created another logo, which depicted a green human shape (made of two circles, and not attached to each other) hugging the Dominican flag. What a disaster that was. It looked like a pregnant person (Octo-Mom?) and no one understood it until I explained it. The teacher tried as best it could to avoid stating the obvious –that it sucked–, and said that it was too weak, that it needed strength. I was the one who suggested trying something else entirely, and she immediately agreed. This logo really, really sucked.

So, after having my new logo, making all those designs and the magazine thingy, promotional items (lighters, stickers, t-shirts, etc.) creating a script for a radio ad, a website mock-up, as well as a nice little storyboard with images that resulted from a mix of photo editing (via GIMP), recycled vector work (via Inkscape) and 3D rendering (with Blender), I went to print it all, hours before the class began. The teacher wanted it to be hardbound, like a book, but that required me to get everything done at least one day before, and I wasn’t even able to finish things on the final day. The website remained a mock-up, but it was supposed to be a working design. There was plenty of time, but I was exhausted in body and mind, and didn’t mind delivering something that was less than perfect.

As I was saying, I went to print my work long before class began. An hour and a half, or so. I figured the printing place would be nearly empty, with most students already on vacation. It wasn’t empty. There was a bunch of people there. Thankfully, I was somehow able to get my stuff printed without waiting half an hour. I was offered the choice of having my work bound, right there, but it wasn’t the type of binding the teacher wanted … just the simple binding for regular work. I declined, and instead went to buy a clear book, with 40 pockets. I chose this because the simple binding looked too regular, and in case the teacher asked me to change anything and deliver it later (so I’d only have to print the changed pages).

I ran into some trouble with the magazine thing. I couldn’t just print the pages and slide them into the book, because it would require turning it upside down all the time. So, I cut the pages out from their borders, and them bound. Then, I could easily put the magazine inside the clear book. The binding didn’t look pretty, but as long as it worked … problem solved.

There was also a CD label design, but I must have cut it too small and it didn’t reach the edges of the CD (which contained the presentation and all that the teacher wanted). I was in a rush, so I couldn’t make a test print of it at home, so I relied a bit too much on hope.

When it was all done, and those classmates who were there had also readied their work (one of them actually got it hardbound), we headed for class. While I had gone to print things early, the class was supposed to have begun by now, and we were late. But it’s a very small group, and those not with me were simply not there yet.

While crossing the street, I almost got hit by a car. I know my luck is bad, but that would’ve been a terrible thing to happen on the last day. If not for one of my friends calling me, I wouldn’t have seen the vehicle driving towards me. I joked about it afterwards, saying how much it would’ve sucked to have done all that work, only to get run over as I’m about to present.

Okay, we got the actual classroom. Not the usual classroom, but the projection room. First time since it was remodeled, that I used the projection room for something that was actually class-related. I (we?) thought the dean of Arts would be there to witness our presentation, but that wasn’t going to happen, just like the previous term. It’s strange, because Graphic Design 9 is his class, but I guess the teacher would just show him our work after we were done presenting.

I offered to present first, because I wanted to be done with it and, if I screwed up, everyone else would forget about by the time the last person presented. The projector was behaving strangely, displaying the wrong colors. My green campaign was blue and pink. We thought the projector was at fault, so we got another one. Turns out that the laptop was being evil, and had to be replaced. I ran with the evil laptop and quickly asked for a replacement. After that, things worked fine.

My presentation was probably the longest (around forty minutes, according to a classmate). I went through all the theory and through each and every logo variation and each and every design. I was going through the script for the radio ad, when I read the part about “nature sounds in the background”. At this point, some members of the audience thought it would help to emit said sounds. Gee, thanks.

At the end of my presentation, I quickly showed the website mock-up and nodded along as I heard the critique. I didn’t think too much of the quickie mock-up, which had seen few updates since the last time the teacher saw it, so I just kept nodding. I did have to defend my work against some of the comments, and had to agree with some others. I didn’t offer to provide a revised version of my work for a later date. That would’ve been crazy of me, as I wasn’t going to spend yet another night on anything else other than sleep. I did agree to complete the theory part and e-mail it to the teacher later in the week, but the design part stayed put.

When I was done, I hurried to a seat in the front, thankful that there wasn’t going to be a Graphic Design 10, which would have been too much, and I think nine levels of graphic design are too many already. If, for some reason, you’re not able to select one particular class in that long chain, you’ll add four months to your college career. It would be great it some could be taken simultaneously.

While I watched others present their work, I had the camera in my hands at all times. If not for the terrible quality of indoor shots (not to mention the weak flash), I’d have more to show for this moment. Oh, well.

Each presentation was shorter than the previous one, and mine held the record for the longest one. When the presentation was done, everyone walked out of the projection room, while I further tested my camera’s ability to capture an indoor scene at night. Suddenly, one of my classmates saw me and said “Hey, group shot!”. Then, everyone walked in again. Great.

Ideally, I would have taken care of the photo-making, not minding that I wasn’t going to be in the picture, but someone (the teacher?) went outside and got an employee to work the camera so the group shot would be complete. The camera’s built-in flash doesn’t reach very far and, while I thought I could fix the shots when I got home, there was little I could do to salvage them.

When all this photo thing was done, we finally went outside, good-bye to the teacher and stayed there for a bit. Knowing that this would probably my last time being in college at night, I kept making some shots of the place outside. Difficult to keep a steady hand, and the flash helps little.

While I was doing that, the others were talking about getting together on the weekend or something like that. Not interested (in part because going out doesn’t agree with me), I ignored pleas from others, who wanted me to promise that I would go. Most I can say for such things is “maybe”, and I just wanted to get home.

Finally, the others were on their way, while Maru and I walked to the south gate. She’s a long-time friend of mine, all the way from Graphic Design 3, and I always wait with her until they pick her up. As her mother was taking her time, we just kept talking and I kept pointing the camera at everything. When Maru was picked up, her mother offered to drive me home, which is just nearby. I gladly accepted, because I really don’t like to say “NO!” to such kind offers.

It was my last day, but that wasn’t the same for Maru, who still had to do her final photography assignment. It seems everyone had a photography thing to do.

I got home, had a quick dinner, wrote that post and … wait, it’s happening again. Essay-sized post. Cutting it short, right about … now.