Rodney Richards, deranged racoon,
Always ate everything with a small spoon.
Whether mustard or custard or a tender young brain,
Rodney’s preference for scoopage was incredibly plain.
Tender young brain? Oh that’s right, I forgot!
Rodney’s other small quirk (which he’d learned as a tot)
Was to act like a zombie (though he wasn’t quite dead)
And to pounce upon people and pry open their heads!
Now before you go judging poor Rodney’s disease,
You should know he did not simply pop as he pleased,
And in fact had not whacked, had not caused one to fall,
And as such had not munched on gray matter at all.
But Rodney was patient, and he tried every day,
By waiting at school yards where children would play.
But his nerves were like jelly and his heart turned to goo
When those cute little buggers waved at him, said: “Shoo!”
Rodney Richards, deranged racoon,
Went to bed daily with his under-used spoon.
He longed for the day when his blood turned to ice,
But until that day came, gummi worms would suffice.
Wonderful artwork by Ape Lad, who had no idea this poem would be associated with his drawings 
Flyin’
by MCM in Uncategorized / September 26th, 2007
I don’t know if I’ve let on to this little secret this week, but I AM VERY SCARED OF FLYING. And not crashing like some people wittily suggest, no, I’m scared of the being-up-in-the-airness. I was just asked if I wanted to give up my window seat for an aisle seat, and I had to contain my excitement and avoid giving the boarding gate people big kisses. No clouds in my sightline! Woo!
Tomorrow is a very busy day and I may not get to spam y’all as often as I’d have liked, but I’m hoping that tonight I can upload a very special poem that I’ve been mulling for several days.
Wish me luck.
Damn technology.
Continuing my silly attempt to document how productions evolve, which began two weeks ago and will go on until someone on the production notices what I’m doing and has me killed.
We’ve touched on the issue of assets before, but it bears some extra scrutiny, because your asset count largely defines what kind of an episode and series you’re going to make.
What is an asset? In a 3D series, an asset is a character, prop, location of effect that you have spent time and money creating, that you expect you can use again at some point. In this way, animation assets are similar to financial assets, which you see when reviewing your bank statements (YMMV). However, you will find in the course of creating your show that the fact that you have these things around means you feel obligated to use them repeatedly, which actually makes them more like liabilities. Headaches ensue.
On the one hand, having a fully-functioning model of your main character is a great thing to have around. It means you don’t have to re-create your principal cast every scene (which undoubtedly speeds up production over time). In terms of principal cast and locations, you want to have as much re-usable material as you can. These core elements are often called the MMP, or Main Model Pack.
(You will often, in the mid-part of a production, find yourself tempted to claim: “this character that I just made up on the spot right now was ALWAYS part of the MMP, don’t you remember?” Saying such things to the Line Producer will cause momentary confusion as he reviews his notes on the matter, but usually results in letter bombs and voodoo dolls. The MMP is for the most core of elements only, and may not be added to willy-nilly. At least not obviously.)
Anything beyond the MMP is considered episodic. The phrase: “He rushes past a man wearing a bowler hat and a pinstripe suit” will result in the Production Manager flagging “CH – MAN IN BOWLER HAT AND PINSTRIPE SUIT” as an asset to be designed and modelled. The first thing that happens is that you’re asked WTF a bowler hat looks like, and you’re forced to look it up on Google because – despite years of being confident about the subject – you’re suddenly uncertain if you’ve used the wrong term after all.
Next, you are shown several designs of a man in a bowler hat wearing a pinstripe suit, and asked to pick one. In most cases, the second option is the best. There’s no good reason for this rule, and certainly never tell anyone you think this way, or you’ll start getting the Line Producers’ choices in second place in every email. And the Line Producer has a thing for big fluffy pink feathers, so you’ve got to be careful.
Once you’ve chosen the design, it goes to be modelled in 3D. One cannot say much on this subject. One cannot remember why. Every time one tries, one has a striking headache in the back of the head where the microchip was implanted.
Now that you’ve got your finished 3D model of Man in Bowler Hat and Pinstripe Suit, you’re ready to make your episode. All’s good in the world. Except… four episodes later, your main character is meant to be conversing with a pretty woman in the park who he’d really like bring out for dinner. And your Line Producer informs you that you’ve run out of available assets for the series, so you’re going to have to start doubling up. And so it’s suggested that you swap out the woman at the park, and use the Man in Bowler Hat and Pinstripe Suit instead! It’s an asset! It pre-exists! Perfect!
“No no no”, you say, “I don’t want to have the main character hitting on some crumply old man in a pinstripe suit!” It’s not that there’s necessarily anything WRONG with that… but y’know… once you make an episode like THAT, that’s ALL anyone’s going to talk about. So why don’t we just swap out the man in the hat with the woman in the park? It’s like reverse-asset-reuse!
Sadly, that is not how assets work. At this stage, too much investment has been made in the man in the bowler, and it can’t be undone. The woman has to go. And you cry a little.
But not to worry! The Line Producer has an excellent idea! They can arrange to have the Man in Bowler and Pinstripe Suit re-textured so that he’s wearing a GREEN SEQUIN SUIT instead! And one of the lead female actors can do the voice! So rather than having a wobbly old codger in a fine black suit flirting with our main character, we have a wobbly old GENDER-CONFUSED codger-ette in a sparkly green suit flirting with our main character.
And strangely, at this point, you think it’s a pretty good compromise.
The much-rumoured firmware update to the iPhone has been leaked to us by a confidential source inside Apple (Thanks, Tommy!) and after applying it to our handsets, we can confirm that it screws the sucker up like Britney Spears at a donut shop before an awards show. Here are just some of the things we’ve observed from our brand-new iBricks:
- Halo 3 Bugs: Upon installing Halo 3 on our iPhones, we were presented with a warning message that said: “This game is not compatible with your version of Xbox Live”, and basically disallowed any network play. Or at least it felt disabled. Might’ve just been the EDGE network. Also, we found that the rumble feedback was lacking that extra OOMPH… almost felt like a my cell phone vibrating. Lame.
- Flux Capacitor Disengaged: My favourite iPhone hack, the Flux Capacitor, stopped working completely. I now have no way to be on time for missed meetings and to play the stock market. Every time you open the app, it tells you: “Great Scott! File not found!”. Biggest loss so far! [ed. note: I never liked this app primarily because you had to run 88 miles per hour to get it to work]
- Blu Ray Support Disabled: Remember all those great hacks involving band saws and nail clippers that let you play Blu Ray discs on your iPhone? Totally disabled. Now when you pop in your copy of Spiderman 3, a message appears that reads: “Format unrecognized. Please use HD-DVD instead.” What a bummer! Update from reader John J: “That’s messed up! I’d installed the HD-DVD hack before the update, and my iPhone tells me to use Blu Ray instead!” Oh, those crafty Apple buggers…
- New User Prefs Confusing: After rebooting your iPhone, you are asked to upgrade your profile. There are lots of cool things in the new profile system, but we had a lot of trouble with drop-down choices (pictured right). It seemed no matter what we chose, we ended up getting SMS spam from someone named Leah, and all she would say was: “WTF Dude?!?!”
- Upgrade? Self-Healing iPhones: The news about parallel universes the other day may have been subtle astroturfing by Apple PR… now whenever you hit, scratch or drop your iPhone, it appears to branch itself into a whole new alternate reality. I dropped mine on the floor a few minutes ago and I now have three units, one of which has a cracked screen. The preferences for this feature are a bit weak (“Damage Iteration Limit” can only go up to 5 at a time), but I’m sure someone will find a way to turn this into a great black market opportunity!
- Distorting Truth: When visiting any major political website using the iPhone’s browser, the list of presidential candidates is limited to just the top two or three from each party! Ron Paul doesn’t show up at all! Update: We have just confirmed that Apple has also upgraded the desktop version of Safari to do the same thing! Ron Paul doesn’t show up on any polls! WTF!
Conclusion
Despite all the issues we found with the new iPhone update, we still think it’s a great improvement on an already-great product. Before, the iPhone was arguably the best phone on the planet… but now it’s even better: it seems shinier, lighter, more solid, with a longer battery life, and we’ve noticed top-notch signal strength for WiFi, Bluetooth and RDF. We love Steve Jobs.
Peace out.
Got an iPhone horror story of your own?: Post it below so everyone knows what to expect!
Also: Our crack team of iPhone upgrade experts will answer your questions!
Michael Geist covers the re-assignment of Patricia Neri, the Director General of Copyright Policy at Heritage, amid rumours she was having a relationship with Douglas Frith (head of the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association). The thing that really makes this suspect is that Neri recently oversaw the movie theatre anti-cam legislation, and probably influenced the upcoming (expected) copyright legislation. One has to wonder what impact her boyfriend (who is buddy-buddy with the MPAA, naturally) has had on Canadian copyright policy… are we headed for an incredibly one-sided bill being tabled in the House of Commons? More-so than we’d expected?
I wonder how much the public consultations that have been going on have been impacting anything… are we just background noise to “official policy”?
