I finished it today and I very much liked it. But surprisingly, this is one instance where the movie was better than the book. Jesse Andrews, the author of the book, also wrote the screenplay, which I always love because it lets the one with the original idea essentially revise their already completed work, as opposed to some other person reading the story and trying to figure out everything the author was trying to say.
Also something we got this week was another member of our family. Say hello to Lolly.
Hello!
Lolly is a very small, very shy Yorkie mix who has been wanting to be adopted for over two years. We don't really know her full background, but we do know that she has been needing a home and my sister will soon need a companion after I go to college.
So after a lengthy process of negotiating and paperwork, we adopted her! And she (and my sister) are now very happy.
Even though it doesn't look like it.
Also, during these few days, I finally watched "The Notebook" with Sam and I absolutely ruined the romance in that movie, thanks to 18th Century American History and a scene where Allie resists treatment from nurses. It was hilarious, but Sam hates me for ruining something that she claimed was "required reading for couples."
We also watched Dope together, on a weekday afternoon when high school has officially started. Coupled with the fact that Dope has been out for awhile, we literally had the entire theater to ourselves. So we were free to comment as loudly and as frequently as we wanted to, and it was great.
9/5/15, 10:58 PM PDT
Today, Kayla, Christina and I traveled to the mythical world of Dungeons and Dragons.
Hell yeah.
Or, rather, preparing for the mythical world of Dungeons and Dragons. Basically, we scoured Kayla's room for figurines we could use, a grid map we can use, and dice.
Dice seems to be the biggest problem right now, since all we could find were two metal D6 that Kayla had, but we had no problem looking for miniatures to use.
Granted, they weren't exactly the uniform-looking D&D miniatures you normally see, but a figurine is a figurine. Instead of knights exploring a large medieval landscape, we'll instead be little jaundiced Lego people aimlessly roaming a world of Pokémon and multicolored frogs and whatever the fuck this guy is:
I'm not kidding. We really have one of these guys.
My sister and I also went to Daiso to buy some college dorm stuff, specifically a coin bank for me to put the loose change that I will inevitably gather in LA. They had a few interesting looking ones, especially this one that I really liked but thought would be a little too intimidating for my roommates.
Because nothing...
says badass...
Quite like a can designed to prevent you from spending your change recklessly.
So I opted for this neutral looking yet still aesthetically-pleasing blue can.
I have no idea what it says.
Later, we went to Target and discovered what it sounded like to strangle Snoopy.
RFotD: While I was filming this, a man was apparently laughing behind me and staring while I was mercilessly shaking Snoopy. He started cackling right after I saw him.
9/4/15, 11:20 PM PDT
So for the past three days, I have essentially been nonstop editing for the next VFX weekly. I wanted to try some compositing with 3D elements, so I decided to try and animate some Star Fox vehicles into my neighborhood.
Thankfully, to save me a ton of modeling time, I managed to find a 3D model of an Arwing, a Landmaster, and a Wolfen online. Bless whoever took those from Brawl, because if I had to model this thing...
...then this weekly would probably have become a monthly. I've only been playing with 3DS Max for about two months and modeling is still ridiculously hard for me. Thankfully, animating is still basically the same as it is in After Effects, so I had no trouble doing that. The only thing that was super difficult about this project was rendering. It took EIGHT HOURS to render, and it basically overworked my laptop in the process.
But I am very happy with the outcome. Take a look.
More importantly, however, let me tell you about the socializing habits of the rare and elusive Filipino mother. Upon the retrieval of their child at another Filipino family's house, such as Samantha's house, the two mothers partake in an elaborate social ritual. In the native Philippine tongue, it is called "wag ka tatahimic" but its closest English translation is "conversation." Though conversation, in the Western sense, is nothing compared to this.
The two Filipino mothers initiate the ritual by first gesturing to the other what appears to be a goodbye wave at first glance. However, between the two women, it is actually a signal that says "I want us to talk for an indefinite period of time in order to delay the work that both of our children have to do for as long as possible." From that point, the two women quickly jump from conversation topic to conversation topic while their children wait awkwardly outside of the car for them to finish. Which is what Sam and I did.
Eventually, when their conversation hit the 45 minute mark, we tried to play a trick on them. Sam snuck into my mom's car (my mom stayed in her car the entire time she was talking to Sam's mom) and she hid in the backseat while we waited for them to finish talking.
We ended up waiting an additional forty minutes, meaning their entire "farewell" conversation lasted an hour and a half. But eventually, my mom drove off.
She didn't notice that crouching in the backseat in the fetal position was Samantha, hidden from view by the back of the passenger seat, her occasional chuckles covered up by the hum of the engine and the guttural hyena-like roars of laughter that my sister was screaming out.
My mom immediately started saying that she could talk to Samantha's mom forever, and I just put myself into autopilot, saying "yeah" to whatever she said. At one point, my mom said
"Samantha's mom talks a lot though, huh?"
She asked that question at an incredible time, right at the point where we reached a stop sign and the sound of my sister laughing stopped for a few seconds. And, with equally perfect timing, in a perfectly silent car, Samantha said
"Yeah, she does."
My mom immediately looks in the backseat, notices that Samantha was still in the car with us, and IMMEDIATELY turns back around to Samantha's house, right as Sam's mom exits the house in panic mode, searching for her daughter.
We explained the situation and even though the entire car was laughing, Sam's mom was panicking. Upon exiting, Sam gave out this weird chimpanzee "WOOO!" howl and raised her arms in the air like Donkey Kong about to throw an invisible barrel.
Her mom threatened to smack us, but it was totally worth it.
RFotD: I feel bad that our little joke made Sam's brother panic too. Her brother's cool, he didn't deserve that kind of fear.
8/31/15, 10:57 AM PDT
Hey guys! Sorry for the lack of updates, but with the VFX weeklies I'm doing and how often I'm out of the house, it's pretty hard to find time to blog every single day. I might just transition to doing these in big chunks so that the "Boring" tag doesn't get exhausted.
So first of all, I finished another VFX weekly!
That was my first time working with 3D and I have to say, I'm pretty happy with the results. You can see some flaws, like how the light from the buildings near the end of the video sprawl out onto the mountain and the light leak from near the lake, but other than that, I'm very happy with the results.
I also got my driver's license! FINALLY. My driving examiner really reminded my of an Italian version of Dennis Nedry from Jurassic Park, and he was kinda rude sometimes (especially in the beginning of the drive) but it didn't matter since today my brain decided to be a decent driver and I passed anyway.
After that, a BUNCH of stuff happened. We went to Viet's birthday party and played hilarious games of Spyfall and heads up, then the next day Sam and I volunteered for the San Diego Film Festival and tailgated the Taylor Swift concert, and then the day after that, Christina, Angela, Kayla, Nick, Ken and I went for sushi, followed by GTA V/the most INTENSE game of "Sorry!" ever at Kayla's house, which ended in a victory for Angela because for some reason she was blessed by the probability gods to always draw "4" cards when she leaves the starting point.
And now I have something to say.
I'm sorry that I haven't updated this as frequently. But to be honest, these past few months have been pretty up and down, and after a lot of time writing, I realized a month or so ago that I don't find much fun in blogging anymore. For the past six or so years, it used to be an outlet for me to be creative while having a log of all the things I did during summer. But this year, it felt more like a chore than anything. It's really visible in my writing that I didn't like this year as much as I did the past years, I mean it's pretty apparent that this year's entries weren't as funny as they were in the past years (if they were even funny at all).
So what happened? Truthfully, I don't know. But if I had to guess, I would say the main culprit is probably the fact that I feel like every entry on this blog has to entertain other people, as opposed to just being something that I do for fun. And because of that feeling that I'm required to write stuff that appeals to other people, I can't be honest 100% of the time on here. No matter how depressed I feel on a given day, I still have to churn out another post and I still have to put in jokes and mildly funny captions in every post or else I would have failed as a writer. You might not have read it, but I vented about it before and those feelings have not changed.
I really want to change that. Because truthfully, it's not a great feeling to have to sugarcoat everything and pretend like every day is nothing but sunshine and rainbows even if I have days where I'm too depressed to even leave my room, or days where I'm exhausted after hanging out with my friends and staying up an extra three hours or so to write does not seem like it's worth it.
And then there's the feeling that this blog takes away from the time that I spend with my friends. I've heard some people say that I "only do things for my blog" and not because I want to spend any actual time with them, and I've also heard that I tell this blog more things than I do my friends. I don't want this blog to be something that takes away from those things, I want to actually enjoy the time I have with my friends, not worry about what I'm gonna write to the Internet. So if you're one of those people that have complained about how this blog has been more important to me than the time I spent with you was, then I'm sorry. And I will change that.
I love the idea of having a record of everything I do during summers. That was the main reason why I started writing summer blogs when I started doing them way back in 6th grade with daily emails. But this year, it became less of a summer vacation chronicle and more of an attempt to please other people online. And I think that has poisoned the blog. So something has to change.
So what now? I'll still be updating the blog periodically (maybe even daily if I feel like it ), but with a different focus. Long time readers will know that six years ago, my purpose of writing this blog was to entertain you. But I think that mindset put a lot of pressure on me to try and write things specifically to appeal to other people, as opposed to writing things because I like to write about them, and that mindset that I had to write to entertain other people was what made me not like the blog as much this year.
I want to make the blog what it was in the past years: a simple record of the stuff that I do in summer, with no obligation to impress anyone. I think if I do that, I'll end up liking the blog way more again, and the content will probably improve along the way too. But no more sugarcoating. If I'm depressed, I'll write depressing things, and if I'm happy, I'll write happy things, and if I don't feel like updating the blog then I won't.
I hope you guys understand. I just really want this blog to be something I enjoy doing again, even if that comes at a cost of viewership.
Okay, thanks for reading my little vent, I'll see you tomorrow.
RFotD: Blogging while I was on vacation in Europe was the worst.
8/20/15, 11:21 PM PDT
The origin of the name "La Jolla" is uncertain, but the two most popular theories are that it either derives from "La Joya," meaning "The jewel" or the Native American term "Woholle," meaning hole in the mountains.
Either of those etymologies apply to Sam though. She's probably gonna kill me if she reads this. But the joke was worth it.
Yeah, we went to La Jolla Cove today to mainly check out the places that were around. We found an exhibit that had art by Dr. Seuss on display.
How cocky are these guys, naming themselves legendary for just being
the exhibitors, huh?
Hey, it's Sam-I-Am, and I'm with Sam! It's like... a pun
or something.
I was especially impressed with the statues that he made.
Rudolph never recovered after never being able to join in any reindeer games.
Sam said this guy had my haircut. I agree.
This one kinda reminded me of a certain AP Physics teacher we had on Mira Mesa's campus.
All he needs is a gray hoodie, huh?
Afterwards, we pulled the incredibly cliché couple move of watching the sunset on the beachside rocks. We sat at La Jolla cove, watching the orange orb of a sun slowly sink below the horizon.
Just kidding. We both had to go to the bathroom. So before the sun set, we looked around the cove to see where we could answer nature's call.
Of course, given the capitalistic society that we live in, literally EVERY place we visited had bathrooms reserved only for customers, so our hunt for a restroom ended up becoming a hunt for where the cheapest place to eat was. And we were in La Jolla, so no matter where we went, this was probably gonna be at least a 20 dollar bathroom break.
We ended up finding a Cold Stone here, so our pee session only cost us 10 dollars, which was much cheaper than the usual arm and a leg blood sacrifice required by La Jolla restaurants.
RFotD: Yes, there were port-a-potties near the beach. No, they were not worth it.
8/19/15, 11:30 PM PDT
Hey! So remember that motion graphic thing I talked about yesterday? Well I finished it today, check it out:
And yes, I know it says "August 20" in the video, but that's because I finished and uploaded this thing at like... 1 AM on August 20. Whatever.
Oh, and as a little behind-the-scenes treat for you blog readers, LOOK AT HOW MANY LAYERS WENT INTO THIS ANIMATION:
Yeah, this was NOT an easy project.
It took me a little over a week to finish this one, which is probably something I should fix since I'm making this a weekly series and all.
RFotD: Based on results from a test by Creative Cow, After Effects can handle up to 1,918 visible layers at the same time. When using AE's "shy" toggle and making some of those layers invisible, however, the number basically becomes infinite.
8/18/15, 4:13 PM PDT
Today was a very work-intensive day. The bulk of it was editing a little motion graphic video I'm doing. Something sort of like this:
Obviously nothing of that caliber, but you get the idea.
It's very difficult, let me tell you. So much shape manipulation, so many layers, and then after that there's a lot of secondary animation to add to make it pretty to look at.
8/17/15, 11;37 PM PDT Today, Angela, Kayla, Nick, and I decided to go to the zoo in order to visit Christina's family just to hang out.
Hey, you can see Christina on top of the sign!
Somewhere in this park, there's a beautiful and elusive animal. Natively found in Africa, we San Diegans are lucky enough to have one grace us with its presence in our very own zoo. Hailed as a divine being in some cultures, it is the epitome of elegance.
It calls itself the "Dik-Dik." And I was on the hunt to find it today.
The first thing we did was take the skytram to the other side of the park. The first animal we saw was unfortunately, not the Dik-Dik, but this guy:
It looks like a living kiwi.
This cute little guy is called a peccary, a member of the pig family with prickly-looking fur surrounding his entire family. He deserves special recognition for being the unofficial welcoming animal for the first annual Kamichan zoo trip. Good on you, friend!
Congratulations!
Of course, with the 3,700 different species in the zoo, I couldn't afford to photoshop top hats on all of them nor can I upload pictures of all of them, so I'll post the highlights.
There was this snow leopard that happened to be standing on a walkway that connects the two leopard cages that I got a pretty okay silhouette picture of.
"I'm Batman."
Not to be outdone, this peacock (which is allowed to roam the park freely!) also did his best Batman impression by climbing on top of a roof.
"I am the night. Err, the dusk."
And there was this guy, star of the bestselling novel "The Poisonwood Bible."
Half giraffe, half horse, half zebra, it's a Gizebrorse! Also I'm bad with fractions.
We also saw a real Angry Bird! Look at how fat it is!
They had to surround it in sand because if it hits anything wooden, glass, or
pig-like, it instantly explodes.
Actually, I believe the title of "real life Angry Bird" belongs to this guy, where he's so angry that it's in his actual name.
Of course it's not threatened, it won't even allow poachers
to step on its lawn, let alone get close enough to kill it.
This animal quickly became one of my favorites when it let out its incredibly cry. My camera glitched when I recorded its song, so instead, have this YouTube video that I found:
Isn't it adorable? Also adorable was this plaque that we found.
We're not sure if Poseidon the leopard dog is an animal or the full legal name
of whatever rich philanthropist donated to the zoo.
We also found Christina's family!
With my estimates, her fist should come flying through my window and into
my face right about n-
Seriously though, hippos are pretty damn cool. Key club D21 definitely chose a good mascot, they're adorable.
We caught a video of one of these guys submerging...
Love me my underwater transition shots.
And we noticed a neat little symbiosis happening between these fish and the hippo:
Much like the symbiosis between Will Smith and those whales in a
particular Dreamworks animated film.
The highlight of the day though? THE ORANGUTANS. We luckily came to their exhibit right as they were starting up their daily Cirque du Soleape show, so we got some pretty good footage:
(Ignore how obnoxious I am on camera, I don't know what the hell is wrong with me)
I especially loved this little guy:
I really regret not bringing Joby to meet his family, but on the other hand, with how active some of the other animals were, it might have been a good thing not to bring him, lest he get mauled to death by these guys:
Oh and I also had a face to face encounter with a koala!
"It's like looking into a mirror." -Christina (Pic via Kayla)
We stayed at the zoo until it was pretty late. Late enough to see the golden hour...
It's pointing up because if koalas touch the ground to cross the street, they go straight to heaven.
And to see when the zoo was nothing but golden light.
The beauty of incandescent lighting.
We got that picture when we were on the skytram at night. And since we took it near the entrance of the park and it was near closing, we would have to walk back to the entrance from the other side of the park. At night. Pitch black night. And although it gave rise to a particularly cool picture of Kayla...
Looks like she's about to perform on stage but she has stage fright or something.
It also gave us some very creepy, horror-game worthy moments. It was inevitable that we had to pass through some of the animal enclosures to get back, and even though the zoo was essentially closed at that time, the ambient jungle-esque noise that played near each enclosure kept playing. And though it might give the exhibits a bit more realism during the day, at night it only served to hide the sound of footsteps from murderers that were walking right behind us.
After sprinting the last 40 miles of the zoo when we though we heard breathing behind us, we made it to the gift shop and decided to distract ourselves from the fact that the San Diego Slayer was definitely real and definitely almost murdered us with his dirty, bear-like paws by looking at the stuff they had for sale.
They of course had cute stuffed animals...
Reminds me of the look I had when I was first told that girls and boys had different parts.
Some "cute" baby children's shirts...
One of those things is not like the other. And no, I didn't just put the shirt there for a photo, you can see the stack of kids size snake shirts on the right.
And a kaleidoscope, which I used to simulate what you'd see when Kayla knocks your lights out when she finally snaps and becomes the San Diego Slayer.
Look closely at it.
RFotD: We never found the Dik-Dik enclosure, unfortunately :(
8/16/15, 10:57 PM PDT
Today, unfortunately, is the last day that we will see Gwen living in San Diego. Gwen, our surrogate white mother who enjoys white motherly things like reading books on her Kindle at the beach, drawing birds, and threatening us with physical violence if we're the wrong Zodiac sign, will unfortunately be in Utah for the next four years to continue her studies into becoming a park ranger/bird drawer/white mother.
God, it sounds like I'm writing an obituary.
Goodnight, sweet prince.
In order to cherish the last moments we had with her, we decided to have a last supper with her at TPOP. We ordered a big ol' ice cream hot pot, which is basically six scoops of ice cream with some awesome dry ice smoke coming out of the center.
Woah.
We also ordered honey brick toast...
Huh.
And a 150 gram rock of pure, Columbia-grade crack cocaine.
And we snorted it right in the restaurant too.
Just kidding, that giant block of chalk right there was Gwen's birthday gift. It's a dinosaur excavation toy, where you have to manually chisel out all the parts of a dinosaur skeleton and assemble the bones like a real life version of Indiana Jones!
As mentioned before, we did this right in the middle of TPOP.
They didn't appreciate the mess,
We got pretty excited when we successfully extracted our first limb.
But then later moved to the rec center to finish the job, fearing that the people at TPOP would throw us out. Here's a few pictures of our entire paleontologic process.
Check out that ribcage imprint on the top.
Making progress.
Things got especially exciting when we removed and assembled the head.
"Hello ladies."
And by "we," I mostly mean me. I got excited. So excited that I filmed this:
Eventually, we managed to assemble the entire skeleton. And we witnessed it in its full, bony glory.
Steven Spielberg would be proud.
We were so happy. And then we had to put it down.
God, so much death today. On a much lighter note, check out this family portrait that Phoenix drew of us!
They're creepy and they're kooky...
Lets go ahead and do roll call. There's Gwen...
You can also see her life goals in the top right.
Kayla...
She looks happy, sure, but inside, she wants your head
on a pike.
Later, we decided to end the day with a trip to Rita's and some fun talking about our Zodiac signs. I'm not really a big believer in horoscopes, but it's kinda impressive how accurate the description of a Taurus is to my personality. And yeah, yeah, I know it's not real and they spin it in such a way that the same traits applies to a lot of people, but I mean if you really know me as a person and you read some of these traits, you'd see some pretty true things.
The last thing we did was read this post on which Zodiac signs you should and shouldn't fight, and it is HILARIOUS, especially when Gwen read it in her really loud, super-dramatic way. We were just LOSING it in Rita's, we probably drove away all the other customers from how boisterous we were, but it was TOTALLY WORTH IT.
To get a slice of our fun, imagine these people when you read their respective paragraphs in that link above:
Aaliyah: Leo
Me: Taurus
Christina: Pisces
Angela: Scorpio
Kayla: Gemini
Ken: Sagittarius
Gwen: Capricorn
Phoenix: Virgo
Then imagine that it was being read by this woman:
And you would have a very rough estimation of how much of a good time we had at that Rita's at six in the afternoon, over Zodiac signs and frozen drinks.
Gwen, if you're reading this, I would like to say thank you for being a great mother and a great friend. Senior year would not have been as fun as it was if you hadn't been there to call me a bitch-ass pussy in class, or show me the beauty that is the giant Speed ride in the Del Mar Fair, or gouged out your eyes with us in some horrifying cultist blood pact. It's been awesome knowing you, but it's not gonna be goodbye because I know someday, the squad and I are gonna get lost in Utah looking for salty lakes and suddenly hordes of Mormons will attack us and right when we're closest to death, you'll descend from the sky and save us from their bicycles. And then you're gonna call us bitch-ass pussies and tell us to suck your ass as you fly back up, above the clouds, cackling the whole way.
Until then, we'll miss you, Gwen.
RFotD: I am actually not sure if she is going to Utah or not.
