lineofaction

Wherein Ryan once again switches projects and posts some new animations…

So the internal project I’ve been working on for several months now just got axed. All details are NDA, but suffice to say I am not thrilled that my hard work over the span of this prototype is being completely discarded. Thus is the nature of the corporate game industry I suppose, so I shant dwell on it. At any rate, Rainbow has opened up some new animation positions so that I might stick around a bit longer. I don’t have any word as to which project I’ll be working on yet, but it’ll probably all be NDA anyway so let’s just say I’m on a new project and that’s that. I posted some new animations to my portfolio section, as well as a new resume with a few modified lines, nothing special. The animations that i did post I’m fairly proud of. Specifically the backflip animation using the Generi setup. I think the posing and for the most part the timing turned out really well on that one, considering I only spent a day on it. So far things are working themselves out, though I’m definitely starting to realize the business side of things in this industry definitely dictates the art side, and in most cases, the business side is not very pretty…

Wherein all bets are off…

Net Neutrality is the big buzz. If you are unaware of what this is...turn on a tv or something...anyway the basic premise is that a proposal is on the table to transform the internet into a 2-tiered system where priority will be given to certain parties (premium services and those companies willing to fork over more cash to the network carriers) which would allows said parties websites to be loaded faster. All those non-premium sites (personal websites, all the small guys where all the real information and use of the internet is derived) would be taken down to a second-tier routing system which would be much more crowded and thus slower. Basically what is being established here is that some information is more valuable than other information, and the way we establish that is how much money said information-broker is willing to hand over.
On a slightly less urgent note, I’m sure everyone has heard all the assumptions that videogames are to blame for our children’s increased violent tendancies, their penchant for killing cops and their friends and their parents and the like. Well in there lies the assumption that kids are more violent today than they have been in the past...not true, fellow netizens. Take a look at this:

http://www.gamerevolution.com/oldsite/articles/violence/violence.htm

That’s right, there’s significantly less violent youth crime today than there was in 1993. In fact, it hasn’t been this low since the 1970s. So...there’s that.

Wherein Ryan goes to the City of Angels for some J-time…

We had a nice 4-day weekend, so I decided to take a trip to Los Angeles to visit my friend Jeremy. It’s a 5 and a half hour drive, made longer by the addition of Hank to the equation. Yes, I decided to take my dog to LA. It was an easier notion than trying to find someone to pet-sit for the long weekend, and Jeremy didn’t seem to mind the idea. Anyway, besides the fact that Hank shivered in terror for basically the entire trip there and back, otherwise he seemed to have an excellent time. So did I, for that matter. It was a weekend of relaxation, eating and hanging out. All things I enjoy. The first evening we had a barbeque, consisting of a great spicy shrimp recipe we found on Foodtv.com and tons of grilled veggies. The second evening I made my newly famous stuffed pork chops, and the third we enjoyed some very nice LA sushi. Also we hit up a great California breakfast place called Hugos. Lots of organic stuff, fresh ingredients, vegetarian fare. Monday we went to a very cool dog-walking park where they let you unleash your dogs. It’s a nice long trail, and while it was tremendously hot, it was a good hike. We completely wore poor Hank out. He slept the rest of the day. I met some cool people, talked about comics a lot, played Super Smash Brothers, drank a bit of beer. We also saw Superman Returns on a 3d IMAX screen on Monday. I actually quite enjoyed it, though I could have completely done without the 3d scenes. It was more distracting than cool. I returned to Phoenix on Tuesday with enough time to head over the Meredith’s to watch some fireworks and have a few beers. A good long weekend.

Everything else is pretty normal. I’m playing a new game on the 360 called Oblivion. It’s a massive single-player RPG with a very detailed world with lots of quests and avenues of completion. It’s really good. It’s really time consuming. I’ve also picked up the old DS again to play Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time. It’s an RPG that it takes good advantage of the DS dual-screen feature. I’m enjoying it so far, but combat is remarkably repetitive so far. It’s similar to Paper Mario but as of now Paper Mario has more interesting and diverse combat options.