Mad Times

I made this animated gif in a new iOS app called Jittergram. This was the first one I tried to post directly to twitter from the app. The tweet went up, but the link it used to the jittergram site doesn’t include the image, alas. Fortunately I also mailed it to myself.

I tried to post it to my tumblr (since that’s where animated gifs belong), but since it’s over a megabyte (just) they resized it when I posted it and broke the animation in the process. Sigh. Technology.

Hard to believe we’ve been going to these for seven years now.

You can see a list of all of this year’s films on the EMP SFFSFF page

Looking at the thumbnails on that page you might think like I did that there was less animated fare this year. This isn’t actually the case. What was different, though, was the number of films with mixed live action and cgi.

I went hunting to see how many of the entries I could find for viewing online. Here they are:

Carta A Julia got my vote for best of the fest. I love how much it does with so little.

Terminus was another fave, this one for its deft blending of cgi and live action (the 70s film look treatment undoubtedly helps cover any seams, but it looks great for itself too.) The director was present at the screening and it was a good thing because he walked away with two of the awards (third overall and the Trumbull award for visual effects)

I liked Matter Fisher for its textural monochromatic animation and mysterious/wistful storyline which reminded me of Gahan Wilson’s ink blot story from Again, Dangerous Visions

The Captivus was another winner in the less-is-more school with its gut-punching social message. The director of this one was at the screening all the way from Boston and gets bonus points for how much he seemed to be enjoying his visit to our fair city. (Granted, Seattle was pulling out all the stops with an early February warm spell.)

Birdboy had pretty animation with an uber-dark storyline.

The Hunter And The Swan Discuss Their Meeting picked up the jury’s Grand Prize continuing the record of jury selections that leave me scratching my head. The film is nicely produced and wittily scripted and acted, but it just felt slight to me for the top award. It’s also distinctive for having the only nudity in this year’s fest. You get the pixelated version on YouTube

Mahahula the Giant Rodent of Happiness is only a minute long and kind of harkens back to the early days of the festival where many of the entries seemed to be the output of people playing with their computer animation software for the first time. But it gets points for a charming voiceover and goofy as heck story.

I’m still not sure what the filmmakers get out of making a short, and what the logic is behind the decision whether or not to put the films online. Thanks to those filmmakers that did decide to share their films online so I could bring them to my reader’s (hi Mom) attention.

I started digging through the boxes of paperbacks that have been sadly relegated to the back of our closet for a couple of years since there’s no space in the bookshelves. I’ve been sorting them into “keep”, “to read”, and “pass on” piles and this is the first one I’ve read all the way through from the “to read” pile.

Visible Light is a collection of fantasy and science fiction short stories by Ms. Cherryh. They are surrounded by bits of a framing tale that has the author accompanying a reader on a routine commercial space flight whose long periods of boredom allow the two to discuss the stories in a sort of Platonic dialogue.

In “Cassandra”, afflicted by visions of destruction who thinks herself crazy finds to her dismay that she is not.

“The Threads of Time” explores what happens when time travel causes history to unravel.

“Companions” shows a mission to a planet rich in vegetation, but lacking any sort of motile or intelligent life. An unknown and mysterious plague takes the lives of all but one of the crew and he carries on with only the ship’s AI for company. Unless they were wrong about the lack of intelligent life.

“A Thief in Corianth” is a fairly standard swashbuckling fantasy only the thief is a woman, but one who operates mostly within the limitations of women in the standard pseudo-middle ages fantasy setting.

“The Last Tower” is a short short about the end of a war.

“The Brothers” is a Campbellian hero’s journey with some satisfying twists and appropriately tricksy fae.

The stories shared in my mind a distant and melancholy tone, but all of them have rich metaphorical grounds that echo off real life in interesting ways.

Well, only 32, but they’re all the stars within 14 light years of home in a 3d animation so you can tell how relatively far away they are. The lines show whether they’re above or below the ecliptic. Nifty.

Whoa, I just noticed that if you point your mouse at a star it will tell you all about it.

via James Nicoll

Theo is never happier than when he can tie you down by resting his chin on your hand or arm.

In 2006 I read only 31 books (a couple of reviews aren’t up yet). This is even worse than the 36 I thought was so scandalously low last year. All the same reasons apply.

We did do some pretty cool things this year that might have eaten some of my reading time.

• Went to the first annual Science fiction short film festival
• Had a big party to celebrate our 40th birthdays
• Had an art and craft sale at our house
• Learned how to do chain mail. And did
• Went to the Philippines
• Switched blog platforms to Wordpress
• Got back into hand drumming, this time dragging Becky along
• Photographed lost gloves #69-111 (42)

We also watched a bunch of movies, so like I posted last year, here’s what we saw and what we thought of them.

The notes are about where we saw the movie and who saw it. “T” indicates we saw it in the theater. Other letters indicate who attended. The default is Becky and me. If only R appears then Rachel saw it with us. If just “J” or “B” appear then only the one of us saw it. “B, R” means I skipped that one, etc.

That’s 75 movies (only 10 in the theater) and doesn’t include everything we watched that we’d seen before. We don’t actually use stars when we rate movies, we use words. I’ve translated our “Don’t Miss” to ****, “Pretty Good” to ***, “Okay” to **, and “Don’t Bother” to * if that helps you make sense of this. If you’re wondering whether you’d like something on here, leave a comment or send email and I’ll blather on.