Sorry for the short entry today. Aside from the giant robot spider attack, not much happened this week.

Boring.

I had a longer entry planned for this weekend, but I was felled by a sinus infection and my head feels like it's been stuffed with cotton. I'm mostly better now and will try to post a real entry soon. In the meantime, please enjoy delicious tacos.

Suddenly, I'm in Southern California.

I try to engage in blog-worthy misadventures each week, but sometimes all I wind up doing is getting a haircut and a new tie, you know what I mean?

Without a doubt, the classiest tie I have ever bought for $10 at a train station.

I mean, as far as ties go, it's pretty unfortunate, but I'd hardly call it a misadventure.

For those of you who don't know me personally, I should mention that I'm not just an unqualified English teacher. I'm also an unsuccessful filmmaker.

For the last two years or so, I've been working on an animation project with the intention of—well, the usual, really. Gaining some notoriety, flexing my creative muscles, maybe making some industry connections.

I'm hard at work on the final draft of the screenplay, but lately I've also been pondering techniques I might be able to use in the animation itself. Without money or collaborators, I'll have to use every shortcut I can think of, but without compromising on quality. Somehow.

Just for fun, I spent this weekend playing with Photoshop, trying to develop a process for generating fake painted backgrounds. See, normally every background you see in an animation is hand-painted by professional illustrators, but I'm not going to have the money to hire professional illustrators, nor will I have the time to become one. So I need to come up with a way of creating animation backgrounds without actually, y'know, doing any work.

Thus, I picked out two of the digital photographs I took in Kamakura and attempted to re-work them as backgrounds. Using a combination of the Artistic:Cutout and Distort:Diffuse Glow filters, plus some gradient color layers, I was able to churn out the results shown below.

The original photo.		Yikes! All it needs now is a mushroom cloud.

The original photo.		Somehow I turned summer into fall.

While the results are unlikely to make anyone forget Craig Mullins, I think it's pretty impressive for two-and-a-half hours' work. I'm feeling a lot better about my options now. With a digital camera and enough time spent wandering around Tokyo, I might just be able to pull this off...

Now I remember why I never leave the house. Because every time I do, I end up $120 poorer.

Still, what's the point of moving to Japan if you're not going to come home with an armload of animé, right? Off to Akihabara, geek capital of Japan, for some cartoony goodness.

That's right, folks. Everything in the store is animé.

This is a great year for fans of Japanese animation—The Big O season 2 is on shelves now, along with Standalone Complex, the 26-episode sequel to Ghost In The Shell. Er... Neither one of which is subtitled, so I guess I'll have to wait a little longer.

But I did find copies of Armitage, Patlabor 3, and hey, that looks like... MADRE DE DIOS! Hayao Miyazaki's Porco Rosso with English subtitles!!!

Awwwww yeeeah.

No, I don't have a girlfriend. Why do you ask?