Cessen Speaks

Aaron and I visited Smurf and Sarah in Pullman last weekend. We had a great time catching up and doing all sorts of things. We went to see Pixar’s “Up”, which was pretty fun.

But as with all visits, it came to an end. Aaron and I packed up the car, hugged the natives goodbye, and drove off over the horizon.

Then we were pulled over by a cop. We hadn’t noticed that the speed limit had changed, and thus were speeding. It was blazing hot, and we had to wait in the car for what seemed like forever while the policeman went and logged some variety of information.

Fortunately the policeman was understanding. We were strangers to this town, after all. And he gave us some directions we already had.

So off we went yet again. Aaron and I had a grand time talking about all manner of things, but particularly how I’ve actually become very judgmental of people based on appearance (it turns out that if you dress “nicely” or “trendy”, then I’m far more likely to write you off as someone not worth knowing; but if you dress strangely or simply haven’t put particular effort into your appearance, then I’m more likely to want to get to know you).

In any case, while we were talking we ended up on the down-side of a hill. Aaron then discovered something quite strange.

“The gas is breaking.”

It seemed that whenever he applied the gas, it was actually slowing the car. Strange, I thought. And then…

“Gah. We’re out of gas.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“You mean, like, we’re actually all the way out?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh.”

And so we pulled the car over at the bottom of the slope, where there was a small bridge over a train crossing. We sat for a moment, a little unsure what to do. And then we got out of the car.

It was hot.

I wondered to myself if it would be feasible to push the car.

“How far to the next town?” I asked.

“Dunno. Maybe 20 miles?” Aaron responded.

Well shoot.

But I wasn’t terribly distraught. Honestly, it was a bit fun. Like an adventure. So like an adventurer I wandered off in no particular direction for no particular reason whilst Aaron called his father for advice.

I ended up walking over to the train tracks, under the bridge. It was maybe 20 meters from the car. I tried my hand at balancing on the tracks, hopping from one side to the other. I was fairly successful. But then I got bored and headed back to the car.

“My dad says to try hitch-hiking. Also, we should put the hood of the car up to seem more sympathetic.”

So we did. And surprisingly it wasn’t long before a car pulled over for us. We ran over as they rolled down their window.

“Can we get a lift to the next town?”

“Sure.”

We opened the the back seat and discovered it was full of stuff. They popped the trunk.

“Just move it back there,” the driver said. So we did. Among the things in the back seat were several blond wigs. Strange, but not off-putting.

We got in. I tried to start a bit of a conversation.

“Where you coming from?” I asked.

“A drag-queen show.”

That explained the wigs! :-)

“Oh cool. I went to pride a couple of weekends ago,” I said.

The rest of the drive was totally silent and awkward.

We arrived in the town of Othello. We thanked the kind people who picked us up, went into a gas station, purchased a container for gas, and promptly went to eat food. It was Subway. And it was yummy.

Then we filled up the gas, and were on the road hitch-hiking again.

We got picked up almost immediately by this awesome old-guy with bad teeth and a fishing hat. His name was Eric.

“I can’t believe no one picked you up yet! Fuck.”

Oh, and he had a puppy. And I got to hold the puppy. The puppy was awesome. It kept on trying to bite me, and I kept on shoving my finger down its throat in response. Each time I did this it would stop biting for about two minutes, and then forget and start biting me again. Silly dog. I adored it.

Eric talked about all kinds of things, and gave us friendly advice. He advised us never to get married, for example. He also swore a lot, but in a positive up-beat way.

Honestly, despite his gruff exterior, you could tell he had a gianormous heart. Just something about him. He was a great guy. I was genuinely glad to meet him.

So we arrived back at the car, poured the gas in, and we were off. We stopped at a gas-station to fill it all the way up, of course. But other than that, the rest of the trip was uneventful.

All-in-all, I’m glad we ran out of gas. It was fun.

I got onto Project Durian! Wootz!

I’ll be leaving for Amsterdam probably late September/early October. The project is slated to last 6-9 months, depending on funding.

This really looks like it’s going to be another awesome project. And in terms of artistic goals it definitely jives with me.

Also, yet again the team is made up of such extraordinary talent that it really humbles me. And anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m not easily humbled. ;-)

I hope I can live up to the expectations of the project!

I learned a new word today: polyglot.

My favorite meaning of the word is comparatively recent: a computer program/script that compiles/runs in multiple languages, and does the same thing in all of them.

Here is an awesome polyglot, written in 15 languages, that simply tells you which language you compiled/ran the program in.

I recently purchased a Wacom Bamboo Fun tablet. Quick summary: it’s a fantastic tablet, worthy of serious use. The whole “Fun” thing is just marketing BS, aimed I suppose at pushing people to the more expensive models. Don’t be fooled: the Bamboo Fun is a serious tablet.

Compared to my Intuous 3 (a “professional-level” tablet) it compares very favorably. In fact, there are things I actually prefer about the Bamboo Fun. The drawing surface of the Bamboo Fun has a papery texture, which feels great to draw on, whereas the Intuous 3 is downright slippery. Also, the actual tablet is lighter and thinner, which feels a lot nicer to hold while drawing.

An important point to make is that the Bamboo Fun already has way more accuracy in terms of resolution and pressure sensitivity than any human hand could take advantage of, so the higher specs of the Intuous 3 (or any other tablet) in that regard are just silly. And actually using the Bamboo Fun confirmed that for me: the resolution and pressure sensitivity are top-notch.

There are a few downsides to the Bamboo Fun, though. None of them are biggies in my opinion, but they’re worth pointing out:

1. The stylus: it’s just not as comfy to hold as the Intuos 3 stylus.
2. The placement of the buttons on the tablet itself: the Bamboo Fun puts them at the top, whereas the Intuos 3 puts them on the side. Therefore on the Bamboo Fun it’s difficult to hold a button down while sketching at the same time, whereas on the Intuos 3 that’s trivial.
3. The largest Bamboo Fun only has an 8×5″ active drawing area. It’s still a good size, but it’s on the small end of good sizes. (This is coming from a guy who prefers large-format drawing, though.)
4. The Bamboo Fun doesn’t detect stylus tilt. For me this is a total non-issue (I never use the tilt feature on my Intuous 3) but it might be for some.

All of that said, the Bamboo Fun is still a solid tablet. I definitely recommend it… especially considering the savings in price over the expensive “professional” models.

I’ve modified this post in the interest of diplomacy and not coming off as an ass to random people stumbling across it (including, possibly, future employers, although this blog is not intended for professional contacts). The gist of the first part of my post can largely be gleamed from this article: Mothers, Don’t Let Your Children Grow Up to Be Game Developers

Bottom line is that the game industry is pretty exploitative. I can’t recommend it as a career choice.

So I’m getting out of the game industry. I love the people I’m working with. I really do. And I’m sad to be leaving them. But I’m not terribly fond of the conditions of employment, and it’s time to move on. I gave notice that I’d be leaving at the end of the month.

So where do I go from here? Glad you asked. I’m joining Project London full-time! I’m really excited about this.

I’ll actually be taking a loss, financially. They can’t afford to pay me much. But combined with my savings I can get by for a while. Eventually my savings will run out, of course, and I have plans for that too.

Plan 1 is to get on Project Durian. No guarantees about that, so I can’t depend on it. But if it works out, I can run my savings pretty low and work on Project London until Durian starts.

If I don’t get on Durian, I’ll need to start any other plans long before my savings run out. I’d like to have *at least* a two month buffer, if not more, which means I’ll only be able to work on Project London for 2-3 months.

With that in mind, plan 2 is to move down to Portland, get a day-job, and start doing freelance 3d work under the “SadFish Studios” name in my free time. Eventually Psy can join me, when she’s done with whatever she wants to do before joining me. In short, plan 2 is to get SadFish started.

Both Plan 1 and Plan 2 are awesome. But if they both fail for some reason or another, I can always fall back on looking for another job.

So those are basically my plans for the next two years of my life. Wish me luck!

A little over a week ago I went down to Sunnyvale California to give a rigging lecture at my old college, Cogswell Polytechnical. I spent four-ish days there, and it was pretty awesome. I got to see a lot of friends that I hadn’t seen in a long time, probably the most happily surprising of which was Vince (an awesome guy that I met through swing dancing).

However, it wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine. I managed to screw up some scheduling, preventing me from seeing Marika. Still feel bad about that. Next time, though, I’ll definitely make sure to see her. Sorry Marika!

While I was down there I hung out with Psy quite a bit. We got talking about hopes, dreams, sad fish, and jackalopes (actually, that last one is a lie), and it turns out that we both have aspirations to eventually start a studio of our own. So we figured why not combine forces and start one right away?

So we’re going to do just that. The plan is for us to both head to Portland and start SadFish studios together. This will be happening some time within the next year or so, either after she graduates or after Project Durian ends (if I’m on Project Durian), whichever comes last.

It’s a scary prospect, especially in this “economic climate” (to use annoying buzz words). We’re going to try to do things in as low-risk a way as possible, but there’s always risk in this sort of thing. Scary scary stuff. But it’s something that I really need to try doing, and I might as well do it sooner rather than later. Life is too short, and you never know when you might get hit by a bus.

So you Portland dwellers can expect a grand return of the Nathan-person some time in the next year-ish. Maybe a little longer. And then you can further expect the Nathan-person to be dirt-poor for the next couple of years after that. But hopefully SadFish will blossom into something awesome.

Here’s hoping. :-)

I would like to report to the world that Aaron Moore is prejudiced against stone people. (That’s people who are made of stone, not people who are stoned.)

Miro 2.0 has been released. Miro is a video aggregator of sorts, with a searchable “tv guide” to a gianormous number of video feeds all over the interwebs.

I’ve been using it for around a year, now, and I’ve been really happy with it. Download it and give it a try.

I am deeply, deeply in love. I met this girl quite a long time ago, back in high school. She was into Blender a bit. Well, she dabbled anyway. But I didn’t really pay much notice. She seemed nice enough, but I was with C at the time.

A couple of years ago I ran into her again. This time in college. She had matured, and she was beautiful. I started chatting with her from time to time. Nothing big, just small talk. Testing the waters, I guess. She was really nice. And smart, too. Super-smart, practical, and down to earth. And she often made references to Monty Python. She had a wonderfully whimsical side. I definitely liked her. But then she left when I met Java in a programming class.

The next time I met her was in Amsterdam. I got to know her a lot better there. She worked with me on Big Buck Bunny, mostly with rigging. I couldn’t have done it without her. We also often stayed up late at night at my apartment, talking and playing. She’s so geeky. I can hardly stand how awesome she is.

She came back with me to the US, and we haven’t parted since. We’ve continued getting to know each other. We still stay up late together from time to time. I’m seriously in love.

I don’t want any other girl. Not C, not Java, not Perl. Not even Ruby. Python is the girl for me. I can’t imagine my life without her. She is amazing. She doesn’t even mind if I go out with other girls some times. She understands that she can’t fulfill all of my needs. Sometimes we’ll even have threesomes with C. But at the end of the day, Python is the only one for me.

The only thing that sucks is that I have to share her with so many other men!

I’d like to take a moment once again to highlight the software MyPaint. It has continued development at a slow but steady pace since the last time I mentioned it, and has just hit version 0.6.

The biggest new feature in 0.6 is layers. They’re entirely hotkey driven, which may seem strange, but it actually works really well. The hotkeys are well chosen (for example, PageUp/PageDown to switch layers), and the layers concept is kept extremely simple.

Support for layers implies adding support for a file format that can store layers. MyPaint has gone with the OpenRaster format, which seems pretty nice. It’s basically an archive of XML and various binary files (such as PNG files).

Aside from layers there have been some improvements in the undo and saving features. Undo is now blazing fast, just like one would expect it to be. And there are more options for saving, the best one being the scratch-save feature.

Scratch-save saves the current painting to a unique file. Each subsequent scratch-save creates a new unique file. This is great for saving stages of your paintings as you go, or just quickly saving backup files in case something horrible happens.

And as always, MyPaint sports an awesomely minimalistic interface as well as an infinite canvas and a super-flexible procedural brush system. You can read more on the MyPaint website.

At the moment MyPaint 0.6 doesn’t have any binaries released, so you’ll have to compile it from source. But it’s worth it!