Kryptonians

It’s very easy to be convinced that you’re on the wrong track. All it takes is a good heart and a conscience.

If you’re a reasonable person, you listen to things others say about you even if they’re negative or unflattering. You’re always watching over your own shoulder to make sure you’re not accidentally doing something horrific to somebody else through your own inattentiveness or insensitivity. Everyone deserves a voice, and you know your opinion is not necessarily the most valid one, and so even when what somebody’s saying is confusing or somewhat against the grain, you give them the benefit of the doubt. It’s just a little thing, you say to yourself. It’s a small concession.

And then day by day, month by month, these concessions pile up. They take you further and further away from your own perception of what’s true, fair and just, until one day you wake up and realize that the entire system’s been shoved so far off center that it’s liable to collapse and take you and everything you hold dear with it. And invariably, this huge shift is for the benefit of a tiny group of manipulative people who don’t give a damned about anyone but themselves. The rest of us are left to pull what’s left out of the rubble and dust it off and try to make do, and the only reason we’re in that position in the first place is that we’ve been convinced that each of the tiny steps that got us there were fair and just, at least in the eyes of some identifiable group if not in our own judgement.

The way they catch us is our willingness to put others before ourselves. Nobody is right a hundred percent of the time. These societal leeches prey on people like us. They take advantage of our good will and grab on the end of the yarn and run like hell, hoping to pull most of it away from us before we notice what they’re doing.

This November 4th, we caught the yarn. And finally, at long last, we’re pulling back. We have a chance to redeem ourselves, and rebuild that which has been lost to the thieves and the liars who told us that it was all in our best interests. The darkness was real, all right - and we did have reason to be afraid of it. But it’s turning out that the darkness was made a lot bigger by the people who stood to gain the most from darkness.

I think I much prefer the light.

A good friend of mine has a husband who is a master chef, and Italian.  He once told me that the Italians have a saying: “Between words and deeds lies an ocean.”

When people judge you, they judge you by your actions.  It’s not enough to sit on the sidelines and watch your life go by.  Life is not a spectator sport.

I’ve been looking at my life lately, and realizing that it is only when I act rather than merely speak of my plans that I make forward progress.  I’ve been learning about animation for a long time now, and I’ve even done a little of it.  But I’m not going to be taken seriously as an animator until I start spending some serious time animating.

Any goal you have that’s worth anything is worth working for, and that means taking action.

I’ve studied enough. Time to put all that study to work.

Unlike other cars’ E.P.A. estimated mileage, the Toyota Prius actually delivers on its claim of 50 miles per gallon. I just bought one, and I was amazed to discover that I could get as much as 70 miles per gallon depending on where I was going and what the road conditions were. Yes, it was expensive, but my car payment will be fixed, whereas the price of gas is only going up. I’ve only had the car two weeks, and I’m already noticing a difference in my bottom line.

I’ve been keeping track of how many miles per tankful of gas I’m using, and it’s coming out to an amazing 600 miles for each 12 gallons of gas I buy! What a relief - my last car was a performance car, and though it could get 34 MPG on the highway if you were careful, it typically got 15 miles to the gallon in rush hour traffic. That makes my Prius about three and a half times more fuel efficient than my last car. That’s a huge difference.

Here’s the money shot:

The full sized version of this is nine megapixels across, and about one and a half megapixels high. It was shot from the porch of the western gate, looking out over the garden and reflecting pool, using a 5.1 megapixel Sony Cybershot. I took about 32 separate images and tiled them together to produce this single image. The version you’ll see if you click on the above image is 2048 pixels wide. Sorry, but I can’t let you download the huge one from my server and have any bandwidth left for myself.

What you’re looking at here is a one-hundred-eighty degree view; you can see the red walls of the western gate on either edge. The tiny dots at the base of the Taj Mahal itself are people. This was taken at about 10AM local time.

It’s hard to describe how I felt when I saw this for the first time. The Taj Mahal is something I’d heard of all my life, and to see it this way - what you’re looking at is what I saw coming through the western gate - nothing I can think of to say really conveys how I felt at that moment. It was a moment of grandeur, of sheer awe. It truly is one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World, and it is more beautiful to see in person than any photograph could ever possibly convey.

Last month I was sent to India to help teach the art of animation to apprentice animators at Rhythm & Hues Studios, Hyderabad.

I made a little detour…

My pants pockets were jammed chock full of stuff. Cameras, wallets, water bottle, you name it, it’s in my pockets. The reason was that there were these rhesus monkeys everywhere, and I was warned to keep careful watch of my possessions because of pickpockets - but they didn’t mean the people.

They meant the monkeys.

They’re known to grab your wallet and run up the nearest tree.  Good luck getting it back.

My Eagle Talon decided to commit suicide days before I left on my business trip to India during the month of March - the studio sent me there to teach the art of animation to apprentice animators in Hyderabad.  Blow-by pressurized the cooling system in the car, which manifested by explosively disconnecting the top hose on my radiator. This eventually resulted in the engine seizing up.

The good news is that the replacement car is a 2001 Toyota Prius! It’s not new, but it’s a hybrid and I’m going to save so much money on the gasoline that the thing will come pretty close to paying for itself in the savings on fuel every month. I drive quite a ways to work, about 85 miles a day as a round trip, so it adds up pretty fast.

Now I just have to figure out how to get rid of the dead car.  I put it up on eBay, and while people are bidding on it, I don’t think it’s going to go for anywhere near what it’s really worth.  Then again, what it’s worth is defined by what people are willing to pay.

Hi, everybody - I finally decided to toss my entire old web site in the trash and start over with a Wordpress blog like every other busy creative professional I know. I finally picked up on the reason everybody uses Wordpress - who the heck has the time to update HTML pages?? I sure don’t. That’s why my site was static since, uh, forever.

The main thing here so far is the Gallery, which has subpages as well, so there’s a fair amount to look at.

These images are in the gallery - they’re just here to whet your appetite, and because a web site without cool stuff to look at on the first page sucks.

As I go, I’ll be adding more. I have to think about what’s going to go up here, though. I have one or two hobbies, but I don’t want to mix that with the professional work. I may have to set up another blog to handle that stuff so that I can keep the two separate.

- Gene