The Andy and Megan Gormans, that is. My brother and his wife came for a visit recently.
Like four weeks ago actually.
Yeah, I’m a little behind.
And we took pictures! Seven or eight of them! Here are two or those.
Clearly Abigail and Megan had a nice time with books. Books about reindeer.
Andy and I, on the other hand, spent all our time building trains. Or so it would appear, based on the photographic evidence we have. I have vague recollection that there might have been beer and sports and maybe some driving in the rain. But no, photos don’t lie. Just trains.
Since I’ve been badly neglecting my blog to work on this video project, I thought I should at least put out a trailer for the film. A completely overwrought trailer.
I threw this together last night. Obviously, it has been approved by no one and the music was entirely purloined.
Anyone who is planning to be there for the Gorman family Christmas this year should definitely watch this. It stands as a warning – no one will be spared ridicule. Least of all me.
Actually, I think it’s pretty awesome, so everyone should watch this.
When you think comic epic fantasy web-only video series, you probably assume you’ll get a certain level of quality.
You probably assume that this level is extremely low. And normally you’d be exactly right. In lieu of posting anything about myself today, I’m just going to present you with the exception to the rule – JourneyQuest.
Watch it and then donate money so they can keep doing it.
Anyone who knew me in my pre-teen years knew that I was constantly making movies. Most of these were science fiction … actually most of them were blatant Doctor Who ripoffs where I played the titular time lord. However, we also did a lot of stop motion animation. Not an easy task with a video camera from 1986, but we made quite a few of them.
Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time converting old video tapes to digital and then splitting them up and editing the into digital form. Most of the ones I’ve done have been of family get togethers and a lot of those old Doctor Whos I mentioned. But the other night I worked on one of our claymation pieces. The meat of it is two guys talking, but whatever they’re discussing has long fled my memory. If anyone has any good suggestions, I’ll redo this video with subtitles for the idea I like the best.
A few things to be aware of while you watch this. First of all, half the credit, whether he wants it or not, goes to Greg Knight. He created the blue creature and was the one with most of the visual ideas. I was a plot guy.
I’ve made a lot of changes to the original film. For example, the original was 45 seconds long. That’s because using the video camera, we couldn’t really measure when the camera had taken a frame, so we’d count out a “one one thousand” and turn it off again. What you get is a series of still pictures instead of a smooth story. So I sped the film about 3 times to streamline it.
Another problem was that every time we hit the button the camera would bounce slightly, so the entire film was really jerky, especially when sped up. Fortunately technology has advanced to the point where you can stabilize old video.
Finally, the video was completely silent. I went through a bunch of stock audio sites and found some sounds that went along with the story. What you see here is the finished product.
If you have any idea of what they should be saying, let me know. And if you’re one of the few people who are worried that I have and am thinking about posting embarrassing video of them as kids acting out ridiculous parts, you’re probably right to do so.
It has been pointed out to me, by reputable sources, that I have been devoting far too much time to editing old home movies and not nearly enough energy to this blog. This is probably true. But I’ve been on a roll with the home movies. Those of you who will attend the Gorman family Christmas fiesta will get a chance to see what I mean.
But there are some things that need blogging about. Halloween is one of them. Abigail selected this one herself. She rejected the bright pink version that we had selected for her from the rack and she picked this one:
I think this shows remarkably promising taste on her part. As you can see below, she can be an imperious queen when she is angered.
Keep in mind that we literally left Disneyland that morning. She could have been any number of fairy princesses for Halloween and we would have happily bought them for her. At three times the price, mind you.
This dress came off the rack at a Cracker Barrel. If you know what that means, then you’ll appreciate this dress even more. If you don’t, well, let’s just say it’s where all good children’s clothes can be found.
Since we have a two-year old now, we decided everyone should be in costume. Guess which of these was the lowest maintenance.
Trick or treating then happened. We had actually set a “no treats tonight” rule because of earlier behavior, meaning she could collect them but not eat any. This proved unenforceable.
As with all things, you have to get the dog’s eye view. This dog being Toby, our next door neighbor and one of Abigail’s favorite living creatures.
I’ll leave you with a nice picture and close by saying thanks to Laura, who took this one.
Short post today. I’ll give you naught but a video that has been winding it’s way through the internet, since it is so much in line with the way I think about the English language; its flexibility is its strength. And if you haven’t listened to Stephen Fry before, he’s really a magnetic personality. In this video he really sticks it to people who think that they’re the guardians of English grammar and constantly correct other people’s usage.
Although he’s wrong about people who say “less” when they mean “fewer.” Those barbarians are no better than animals.
The internet can be boiled down into two types of … things.
It can actually be boiled down into a vastly wider array of things, a soupy, lumpy, stinky mess of things, representing the wide spectrum of human thought and belief. However, that makes for a less dynamic starting sentence, so I’m going with two types. I will refer to them as the Curds and Whey of the internet.
Since curds and whey is also a sort of soupy, lumpy, stinky mess, I feel that the gods of metaphor will be satisfied and pass this blog post by when their day of reckoning is at hand.
Let’s start with Whey, the watering matrix that binds the internet together, the flotsam that keeps people coming back for pictures of cats, videos of people falling down, blogs where dads talk about their daughters; things like that.
The Whey can be summarized by this video. Consider it another offering to appease the gods of metaphor. Go ahead and watch it. I’ll wait.
Whey can be defined as things that you either really enjoy or judge others for really enjoying. Everybody likes at least some sort of Whey.
Well, us lactose intolerant people don’t really like it, but let’s not get into the digestive implications of the metaphor. I can feel dieties raising their eyebrows as I speak.
Then there are Curds. A lot of people hit a Curd and immediately turn around, hurrying off to find a video of a cat in a suit doing an ethnic dance of some kind. Those are the TLDR people. While some things – arguably most things – on the internet aren’t worth reading, they risk missing out on what the internet is really all about.
The Curds can make you a better person.
Now that I’ve written that down, it sounds overblown. Let me try again.
The Curds often represent the heights that we can rise to as a species.
Hmm. Okay, let me show you an example of what I mean. I know this video is a bit of a commitment, but if you aren’t making that commitment to at least some things then you really are missing out on he Curds.
“Apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease, we’ve understood nothing else.”
In any other context, that sentence wouldn’t give me chills, but here it is, changing the way I think. If the internet didn’t exist, these ideas wouldn’t spread like this. Because they do, everyone is better off. It’s the rising tide. The good one, not the one that floods the harbor.
Not that you always need to agree with the Curd … people in a Curd … er, I’ll just try to be more observant of metaphorical holidays. Here’s another TED presenter who doesn’t quite articulate the problem or make his solution convincing, at least for me, but he made me think and that should be the point.
TED is essentially all Curds. The Demotivators blog is pretty much all Whey. I really like them both, but only one of them ever makes me think about the world and how I conceive of it.
I’ll leave you with that, now that I’ve danced all over the fine line between interesting and preachy. Tomorrow I’ll return to general daddy blogging.
Abigail has been pretty used to going to bed with her Mama lately, and isn’t one to take a change – like Daddy taking her to sleep, for example – lying down. Tonight I managed to grease the wheels with her through the light-up frog we got at Hannah’s birthday party the other day. I then followed it up with a story about her Ponies. Her little ponies. She has four now. They doubled their herd this weekend due to a particularly prolific garage sale.
The first thing I needed to do was to determine the ponies names. I couldn’t very well call them, “Purple Pony” and “Pink Pony,” could I? Abigail informed me that the baby pony’s name was Tutu. I then asked the other names and found out that they were all named Tutu. So I called them, “Purple Tutu,” “Pink Tutu,” along with “Blue Mama Tutu” and “Blue Baby Tutu.”
They wanted to do what all ponies want to do: get groomed. I asked Abigail if she knew what “groom” meant and she said that she did. It meant “you go over there and down there and zoom and,” she stuck two finger in my neck and wiggled them. “I groomed you.”
This won her an especially large hug.
As it turns out, Purple Tutu had left the grooming brush on her windowsill in their floating city and it had fallen out into the forest below. Good think Pink Tutu has wings. She carried them all down to the forest where they split up to search. It was a dark and scary forest; splitting up was a narrative inevitability.
Blue Mama Tutu and Blue Baby Tutu came to a bog, where a familiar glowing frog told them that he might have seen something fall out of the sky. If they could help him, he would help them. You see, the frog was hungry, because all of the flies had gone somewhere else.
Meanwhile, Purple Tutu and Pink Tutu had reached the edge of the forest, where they found an enormous pile of trash someone had dumped there. As you might expect, it was covered with flies. Purple Tutu wasn’t having this. She used her special trash removal magic power, shaking her purple mane, and the trash disappeared.
The flies, realizing that their banquet had left, decided to hightail it back to the bog, where the frog was so happy that he immediately started glowing. He told Blue Mama Tutu and Blue Baby Tutu that something brush-shaped had fallen on the other side of the hill. They reached the top just as Purple Tutu and Pink Tutu came up the other side. And sure enough, there was their brush.
It was a very nice hill and a sunny day, so they spent it grooming each other with the brush and enjoying the outdoors. When the sun started going down, Pink Tutu carried them back up to their floating city and they went to bed. Purple Tutu was careful not to leave the brush on the windowsill anymore.
That story pretty much carried us through, at least in terms of Daddy being an acceptable bedtime substitute for Mama. The stuffy nose kept me in their for another hour, but all in all, a good night’s work.
I was going to do a deep, meaningful post on the internet and what it means, but then a box arrived on our doorstep. This provided two immediate sources of joy to our house.
This obviously had to be put on, but we also had to immediately begin climbing in an around the box. And decorating it, of course.
The box even had to come upstairs for bedtime. In fact, it was a pretty even fight between the costume and the box. I’m guessing the costume will win out, long term, but for tonight, she loved them both equally.
I also took a video, which you’ll find below. It’s short, but it pretty accurately summarizes our post-fairy evening.
I was going to do a deep, meaningful post on the internet and what it means, but then a box arrived on our doorstep. This provided two immediate sources of joy to our house.
Nonsensicles 