Happy New Years Eve everyone~ :
D [technically still '09 here for a few more hours]
What can I say about '09... It had its awesome moments but it also had heaping amounts of suck. Especially around the end of second semester things started going downhill. The beginning of the year was pretty alright. I took Art 28 which was Animation/Illustration Fundamentals which like.. forEVER helped my drawing. For reals. I <3 GESTURE. I also made my first animation in that class. Even though I wasn't getting much sleep during that time, I felt very accomplished.
Summer time things started to start sucking a bit. I had a week's vacation in Hawaii... except it was pretty boring 'cause the island of Kuai is pretty rural with not much to do. Oh, and I almost drowned! Literally! :
D Cross that one off the list. And when I got back from Hawaii, I had like 3 days to get ready for AX [which was okay. too much time making buttons and losing my conbadge... and not much else orz] including one more print to finish and a list of things to print out. On top of that, I learned belatedly that my appointment to sign up for classes was up and I had literally NO time to even think about what classes to pick until like a week after the fact. That almost screwed me over royally. I started the fall semester with 6 units [I needed 12 to be full-time and for my grant to kick in and for my dental insurance to exist]. SOMEHOW I ended the week with 15 units. Word. What's more, all of my classes were pretty good, some even awesome. But this one class... oh my god. I have NEVER has such an awful teacher. EVER. IN ALL MY YEARS OF SCHOOLING. This guys was a class A douche. Seriously. But I got an A in the class so it's okay. Oh, and I also got my first C in college. NO idea how I got it but whatever.
SO YEAH. Pretty psyched for '10. Fuck '09. '09 is a bitch.
I mean. Heart Gold/Soul Silver are coming out in March. Fuck yeah. OH. And Dreamwork's "How to Train Your Dragon". I WANT this movie to be good so badly. Because... fucking DRAGONS man. D: What else am I excited for... if The Last Guardian is coming out next year, you can bet I'll be all over that like a lonely twifag to The Vamp [what].
SPEAKING OF MOVIES... I've got a bone to pick with Avatar ohoho~
I'm not gonna lie, I went in this movie with low expectations... for the most part, there were no surprises. I expected a below-par story, indeed I got a cliche one. I expected good visuals, hell yeah there were some good special effects. I expected to rage silently throughout the whole movie about the blatant violations of biology and physics [not in the ways you might think]... oh yeah. I raged.
To be fair, I was pretty bias against this movie the moment I learned of its name. Back then, when someone said Avatar, you KNOW they meant Avatar: The Last Airbender. Actually, I'm pretty sure it was back when I first learned about the live action movie being greenlit. It was like, OH SHIT. AVATAR LIVE ACTION MOVIE FFFFFF.... WAIT. WHAT. IT'S NOT GONNA BE CALLED "AVATAR" AT ALL? WHY THE FUCK NOT?! And then I learned that James Cameron was butthurt and pretty much claimed that the right to name a move "Avatar" belonged to HIM because he's James Fucking Cameron and he can do whatever the fuck he wants [also the movie's been in the works for like 14 years or whatever]. So now us AVATAR fans are stuck with "The Last Airbender." Well fuck.
And that was back when no one knew squat about what the movie was actually about. And then came the first trailer. My reaction was pretty much, "um. what the fuck." I didn't know WHAT I just watched and as the months went on and more trailers were released I STILL wasn't sure until the movie came out and reviews pretty much spelled it out that it was Dances with Wolves in SPACE with a side dish of FernGully. And you know what? That's
exactly what it was.
Everyone keeps using the words "amazing" or "awesome" to describe this movie. I would call it "okay" at best. Copacetic.
-PLOT SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT READ AT YOUR OWN RISK-Okay, my biggest beef with this movie is the designs of the Na'vi [HEY LISTEN]. Terrible. Just..... terrible. Honestly, they are the Twilight vampires of aliens. Except... okay, they aren't THAT bad but you see what I'm getting at. But basically the ONLY reason the Na'vi look the way they do is to appeal to the general public; to look just human enough for us to easily sympathize with them but still different enough to recognize that they are not one of us but STILL not too different so that there aren't TOO many bestiality or xenophilic undertones [I still felt them anyways. The "mating" scene? VERY uncomfortable]. It's shallow. I mean, it would have been like okay whatever if the Na'vi matched the surrounding fauna a little... they didn't. In fact, most of the indigenous fauna were 6-limbed, no hair, and limited sparkling. There WERE some species who followed the 4-limb model but they still looked drastically different from the Na'vi. What I'm trying to say is... the Na'vi looked like aliens on their own damn planet. I could not find ONE fucking reason in the WHOLE ENTIRE MOVIE to explain WHY they looked so
conveniently human OR cat-like. Hell, I couldn't even find a reason why they looked so mammalian while the rest of the fauna was more reptilian. None.
Sorry James Cameron but BIOLOGY/EVOLUTION DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY. LERN2BIO. Seriously, it was a CONSTANT distraction for me the entire movie. I think I might have been the only one in the who theater who felt that way but then again I'm a bio nerd. Still, that's no excuse for the fuck-up.
I had another issue with the Na'vi but it's relatively minor and I THINK the answer was implied during the night scenes in the movie. At first I was like, "why the fuck are they blue? They're in a GREEN RAINFOREST how are they camouflaged at all???" But then every night on Pandora the entire forest lights up like a fucking rave party and the Na'vi actually blended in pretty well with their surroundings so then I was like, "okay, they're mainly nocturnal, that makes sense then..." Except most of the move took place in day time. What the fuck ever. I tried.
That being said, ALL THE OTHER ALIEN DESIGNS were pretty kick ass and very unique. My favorites were the two dragon species that you could RIDE. Seriously, those things were cool as shit. Especially during the last battle where it was like "oh shit, the good guys are fu- JESUS CHRIST HUGE FLOCK OF DRAGONS COMING IN TO SAVE THE DAY FUCK YEAR." The land-dwelling creatures had pretty sick designs too- they LOOKED like animals on an alien planet- bizarre but believable. Only thing that REALLY bothered me about the animals were the noises that they made. The big 4-legged carnivore used a recycled track of the T-Rex from Jurassic Park as its roar. I wish i was kidding. And the 6-legged horse things used recycled velociraptor sounds from Jurassic Park as well. I'm not sure if they did that on PUROPOSE but... it seemed really cheap and WERE TOTALLY DISTRACTING. But you know, other than that, they were pretty much the best part of the movie.
The final battle was pretty sweet too. Especially when all the wild animals heard the call of nature or whatever came to rescue everyone's asses and SAVE THE DAY FUCK YEAR RANDOM WILD ANIMALS. It gave me happy goosebumps.
Soooo pretty much 90% of this movie was animated. I feel SO sorry for the animators and designers who had to render EVERY SINGLE LEAF AND ROCK AND TWIG... I wouldn't be surprised if one of them just keeled over and died during production lol. But damn... Brilliant job guys, I applaud you. <3 [even if there was some Uncanny Valley going on with the Na'vi.... can't be helped I guess].
Chracter wise, most everyone was pretty bland except for the 2 main human females and the army general dude with the scars. I especially loved the biologist woman, Grace. She was so cool.I loved her snarky personality. Of course they had to kill her off. She was too cool for this movie [BAWWWWWW ;___;]. And the chopper pilot girl. She was really cool too. And kick ass. Of course she got killed off too during the final battle. [FFFFBAWWWWWWWW] And the scarred dude... he was just bad-ass. And evil. I still liked him. Fucker needed TWO poison-tipped arrows to bring his ass down hahaha.
This is getting long, so I think I'll stop here. Um. Should you go see this movie? Sure. Just... don't pay for it. Also, bring a snack because this movie is LONG. And it FEELS long. And... I guess 3D helps you appreciate the rendering an animation? Sure, let's go with that. Oh and if you hate the color blue... do not see this movie. You might kill something or someone. Oh, and if you have a seething hatred toward tree-huggers... don't watch this movie.
Sooo there's my last rant of the year. Felt good. :> Gonna make a one more journal to bump this one off my front page and after that, prooobably gonna have a livestream session. Later~
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Q: WHEN ARE YOU GONNA UPDATE YOUR
TWILIGHT PRINCESS DOUJINS???A: When I feel like it.Q: Do you take requests?A: Only when I offer them in my journals.Q: Do you do art trades?A: Only if I know you personally.Q: Will you be my friend?A: Uh...Q: Do you take commissions?A: SOON...Q: Why do you draw so many Pokemon?A: I liek Pokemans.Q: Did you make that snazzy little talking
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journal bump- HAPPY NEW YEAR 
uNF!
CRUISE-CONTROL etc.
