Christmas morning wasn’t the usual grey, cold affair this year so there were plenty of brave souls out for the traditional Christmas swim at the 40 foot in Dun Laoghaire. I spotted this group as we were heading down to the seafront…I’m sure it sounded like a great idea in the pub on Christmas Eve.
More on Flickr
For my last post before Christmas I’ve been tagged by Sinéad of Sigla so I feel like a proper Blogger now…
The first player of this game starts with the topic “five weird habits of yourself,†and people who get tagged need to write an entry about their five weird habits as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose the next five people to be tagged and link to their web journals. Don’t forget to leave a comment in their blog or journal that says “You are tagged†(assuming they take comments) and tell them to read yours.
I kind of already covered my insane quirks in this earlier post but hey, I’m not short of weird habits so here’s five more:
1. When I’m sleeping I have to have the duvet pulled up over my ear, it can’t cover my head or face, but it has to cover my ear.
2. I prioritise the food on my plate, the required order is 1. meat 2. veg 3. potatoes…because, of course, potatoes are the best bit.
3. If I’m walking and I accidentally slap my arm against my leg, I have to slap my other leg with my other arm to even myself out.
4. (This is a family one) I can’t leave one baked bean in the bottom of a tin…either get all the beans out or leave two in the bottom to keep each other company.
5. And following on from that one…tins can’t be placed upside down in the cupboard because then all the beans will be standing on their heads.
Now for the next victims…I’m tagging:
Ryan of Rymus{dot}Net
Donnachada of The Daly Blog
Frank or Bif of BifSniff Cartoons
Cyberscribe of Shitty First Draft
Nelly of Nelly’s Garden
So, Happy Christmas to all of you and last one out of the blog building please turn out the lights.
First off I’d like to thank Kevin from Disillusioned Lefty for having the nerve to walk up to the obviously lost me in Kehoe’s last night…
Kevin: “Are you looking for someone?”
Me: “I’m looking for a group of someones.”
Kevin: “What sort of group?”
Me (finally giving in and saying the word): “I’m looking for Irish Bloggers.”
Kevin (relieved at not having outed himself to a normal non-blogging human: “Me too!”
So, the two of us resumed the round of Kehoe’s trying to catch the words “blog” “statcounters” or “technorati” in conversations without much luck. Thankfully Colm Bracken of In Fact, Ah recognised Kevin and he led us to the rest of the bloggers standing under a sign which we’d somehow managed to miss.
The others that were there were Sinéad of Sigla, Dick of Backseatdrivers, That Girl from Thinking Out Loud, John of Earth and Universe and Padraig of In Fact, Ah, all of whom I thoroughly enjoyed meeting. We even touched on that subject. Unfortunately John had to leave early so he missed the arrival of Twenty Major who I can reveal is a lovely lad altogether.
When I was a kid, the only Santa worth going to see was Switzer’s Santa on Grafton Street. My parents, my sister and I would stand in line with hundreds of other families in the freezing cold and the line would stretch around the building for what seemed like miles. Back then the windows of the shop would be full of wonderful mechanical scenes of elves in their workshops busily nailing together wooden toys, singing carols and feeding the reindeer. Nowadays Switzers is no more and Brown Thomas stands in it’s place. They did away with the Christmas windows in favour of glitzy mannikins wearing skimpy Santa lingerie and designer gowns. I guess there was no profit in the old Santa’s workshop ones.
Going to see Switzer’s Santa is one of my best Christmas memories because, of course, Switzer’s Santa was the real one. All the others were just Santa’s helpers and that, my mother assured me, is why I could see the stitching on their beards. This became my method of sorting out the real from the stand-ins and the beard on Switzer’s Santa was fluffy and white and seamless.
I don’t remember ever being scared of sitting on Santa’s knee but this webpage gave me a laugh. I can’t say I blame the kids in a lot of these photos…I bet they’ve just spotted the seams: Scared of Santa
If there’s one job that I hate to do as an animator it’s rigging a character. For any of you who don’t watch the extra features of Pixar DVDs, the rig is the skeleton of any 3d character and it’s what the animator uses to, well, animate the character. But before you get to that part, the fun part, you have to first build your character and then you have to attach him to a skeleton. This is the part that’s called rigging and to me is about as tedious as it gets. A 3d character is made up of hundreds of triangles (called polygons) and each point of these triangles is called a vertex and each of these vertices must be attached to the joints of the rig in such a way that if you move the index finger joint, the index finger of the model moves and only the index finger moves…not the right knee or the big toe. And if you think reading that last sentence was boring just think what it’s like to actually do it!
This process can take days (or weeks if it’s me), and in large games and animation studios there are technical artists whose job it is to do only this. They are usually the nervous, twitchy ones sitting in a corner mumbling to themselves. It means that the animators are handed ready-rigged characters and we can just get on with the animating. So that’s great for the studio stuff but, if you want to do your own animation, maybe for that short film you’ve been secretly wanting to make with dreams of film festivals and Oscar nominations, you’re probably going to have to attempt the rigging yourself, at least if you want to have your own original characters.
Well, I was perusing Keith Lango’s blog and hallelujah but some clever people have come up with a programme that does your rigging for you and they only want $99 for their brilliance.
The Setup Machine is going on my Wish List for this Christmas and if Santa doesn’t get it for me I’m just going to have to get it for myself because this is the one thing that’s been holding me back from making my own film…well, that and the small matter of not being able to come up with a good, simple, witty idea…anyone want to come up with a programme for that?