This could be the start....
Nothing gets my mood down quicker than a stumper.
By "stumper", I mean a subject or skill that I don't gain mastery (okay okay, familiarity) of within two to twenty minutes. Like a bass line I can't seem to lick, or a person I haven't comfortably profiled into a convenient little stereotype. Today, my irritation stemmed from Adobe After Effects 7, which I tried to learn using the help file. I don't know why I even thought it would be possible. Maybe because animating is supposed to be as simple as putting a certain image at a certain point in time. Beside, all I wanted to do was have pictures pan and graphics drawn in as if an invisible hand was writing them. Sounds simple enough.
Well, I couldn't do either (update: I have just learned how to do the drawn-in effect) and I spent the better part of the day reading about keyframes, expressions and masks. To make matters worse, I realized that I had to draw, a skill which I had neglected long, long ago out of sheer laziness. My head started to throb, and my cold symptoms became extra irritating. I remembered my deadline. But I gave up for a while and watched Sunset Boulevard to calm myself down. On hindsight, it was probably the wrong movie to cheer myself with. I returned to work (glumly, of course) and began racking my brains once more, praying for a revelation, that maybe I could just reach into the monitor and shape the graphics with my bare hands. Now, looking back at what appears to be a wasted day, I can only smile and laugh at myself.
Because it's comforting to know that I can still be humbled, even if it means getting my ass kicked by a mammoth computer program. It means that I'm trying really hard, failing, and getting back to trying after licking my wounds. It means that like so many people in the world, I say yes to something that I have no idea how to do, and try to cram learning into 1/10th the span of time it should really take.
It's sobering to remember how human we all are.
DAILY RANT: Religion
Today, I will be ranting about religion. Particularly against those who consistently tout it, not as the solution to the world's problems, but those who consistently tout it as the source of all the world's problems. The feelings have become increasingly passionate and vehement. Any claim of affiliation with any god is met with sneers and derision.
My brother-in-law, in a job interview conducted by the president of a prestigious company was asked the question: "What's your standard for truth?" He reluctantly replied that he was a Bible-believing Christian, to which the president immediately and carelessly quipped: "All Christians are judgmental." (IRONY ALERT!)
It is an admittedly convenient scapegoat. Evil acts done in the name of an unseen God or gods do seem like legitimate reasons to grab our pitchforks and go on what suspiciously resembles witch hunts. But I don't think God-bashers have really thought about the ground they stand on. Any coffee-table discourse on religion in it inevitably brings up the following: the Inquisition, the Crusades, and suicide bombers. Conveniently omitted are the following theos-free topics:
Tiananmen Square
Pol Pot
Joseph Stalin
Nazis and neo-Nazis (saying Hitler was a Christian is like me saying I'm a professional wrestler because I lift weights too)
And so on...
I know it's particularly fashionable at this turbulent point in history to find one single aspect of humanity to unleash all your frustration on, but let's just reconsider for a moment, and realize that when we do so, we become that very thing which we claim to hate so much in religion: hypocrites.
Evil is not a religion thing. It's a man thing. So can't we all just get along?
By "stumper", I mean a subject or skill that I don't gain mastery (okay okay, familiarity) of within two to twenty minutes. Like a bass line I can't seem to lick, or a person I haven't comfortably profiled into a convenient little stereotype. Today, my irritation stemmed from Adobe After Effects 7, which I tried to learn using the help file. I don't know why I even thought it would be possible. Maybe because animating is supposed to be as simple as putting a certain image at a certain point in time. Beside, all I wanted to do was have pictures pan and graphics drawn in as if an invisible hand was writing them. Sounds simple enough.
Well, I couldn't do either (update: I have just learned how to do the drawn-in effect) and I spent the better part of the day reading about keyframes, expressions and masks. To make matters worse, I realized that I had to draw, a skill which I had neglected long, long ago out of sheer laziness. My head started to throb, and my cold symptoms became extra irritating. I remembered my deadline. But I gave up for a while and watched Sunset Boulevard to calm myself down. On hindsight, it was probably the wrong movie to cheer myself with. I returned to work (glumly, of course) and began racking my brains once more, praying for a revelation, that maybe I could just reach into the monitor and shape the graphics with my bare hands. Now, looking back at what appears to be a wasted day, I can only smile and laugh at myself.
Because it's comforting to know that I can still be humbled, even if it means getting my ass kicked by a mammoth computer program. It means that I'm trying really hard, failing, and getting back to trying after licking my wounds. It means that like so many people in the world, I say yes to something that I have no idea how to do, and try to cram learning into 1/10th the span of time it should really take.
It's sobering to remember how human we all are.
DAILY RANT: Religion
Today, I will be ranting about religion. Particularly against those who consistently tout it, not as the solution to the world's problems, but those who consistently tout it as the source of all the world's problems. The feelings have become increasingly passionate and vehement. Any claim of affiliation with any god is met with sneers and derision.
My brother-in-law, in a job interview conducted by the president of a prestigious company was asked the question: "What's your standard for truth?" He reluctantly replied that he was a Bible-believing Christian, to which the president immediately and carelessly quipped: "All Christians are judgmental." (IRONY ALERT!)
It is an admittedly convenient scapegoat. Evil acts done in the name of an unseen God or gods do seem like legitimate reasons to grab our pitchforks and go on what suspiciously resembles witch hunts. But I don't think God-bashers have really thought about the ground they stand on. Any coffee-table discourse on religion in it inevitably brings up the following: the Inquisition, the Crusades, and suicide bombers. Conveniently omitted are the following theos-free topics:
Tiananmen Square
Pol Pot
Joseph Stalin
Nazis and neo-Nazis (saying Hitler was a Christian is like me saying I'm a professional wrestler because I lift weights too)
And so on...
I know it's particularly fashionable at this turbulent point in history to find one single aspect of humanity to unleash all your frustration on, but let's just reconsider for a moment, and realize that when we do so, we become that very thing which we claim to hate so much in religion: hypocrites.
Evil is not a religion thing. It's a man thing. So can't we all just get along?