Concerns of a Tired Individual

Right now, I have a lot of things on my mind for one reason or another.

The most important one of these is with my puppet project. My main concern is if I have a studio space to work in over the summer. Because of how my schedule is worked out, I can only get to the studio once a week. And even then it is for less time than I have been working over the course of the semester. Not that it really matters since the teachers are pretty much unavailable.

This, unfortunately, leads me to a personal concern involving the direction of my thesis. The avatar idea is starting to focus on cute culture images. The puppet, once designed to look like a cross between my self portrait and Scooter from The Muppet Show, seems to now want to take a chibi form of my avatar similar to the print out I just framed from Kinko's. It only serves as ironic that the video idea I have for this puppet is to present a two-faced situation where the most honest and sometimes mean-spirited dialogue is being said by this cute puppet and everything else will be said from my real-life self. (If you got that, then congratulations, because right now I'm bordering on mental instability due to unknown factors.)

Thing is, yesterday saw a sudden meeting of faculty and students in a candidacy presentation for a new sculpture teacher who will be taking over Jack's position. Jack got a teaching gig in my aunt's old college of Oregon U. Jack also attended there at one point, but starting in the fall, he'll be part of the Ducks as a faculty member. The potential teacher to replace him has taught on both sides of the lower forty-eight, one school in particular I tried applying to but failed to get in due to a weak portfolio. While showing his work, his personal emphasis was to try and be sincere as he grew tired of artists being ironic in both the New York and Seattle art circles. His students' works also displayed this push of trying to be as sincere as possible visually with their conceptual ideas.

With the thought that he may be a teacher I'll have to face in the future, I looked at my finished works (all three of them) wondering if I was being sincere or playfully ironic. It got to the point where I wasn't sure what I was doing again, and that this drive to produce anything I could come up with was a "grasping at straws" attempt to get the hell out. A desperate measure for a desperate situation.

In the end, I left the studio not knowing what I was doing with the puppet as far as construction goes and questioning why I am doing it in the first place.

In an unrelated subject...

As of this entry, I'm approximately sixteen days away from owning a creative tool specifically made for character designing and avatar creations. It's a tool used in the up-coming video game Spore known as The Creature Creator.

I've had my eye on the game since its announcement three years ago with eager anticipation that I will have a computer by then strong enough to play it. It was and will be the last video game I will ever buy. The video game market as I see it now is too redundant in both product and game play. Innovations are few and far between, and nothing can keep my interest as strongly as Spore has with the emphasis of the game being player creativity.

But recently, I caught wind of news that there may or may not be a security measure in the CD/DVD which has been frowned upon by the PC Gaming community. With the intent of stopping software piracy, this program ultimately makes it impossible for honest people to do innocent acts like burning a school report onto a CD or making a DVD of their recent vacation videos. Why? It mistakenly thinks these acts are acts of piracy. From what I've been able to research, there is no way to remove the problem other than downloading programs designed by hackers (I would classify them as White Hat Hackers since they are helping rather than hurting in my book.) that compromise the piracy prevention. Other reports have stated that the program is very intrusive and will disable things like anti-virus software and third-party firewall programs. Among other problems is the fact that the game will become unplayable after three installations, be it on the same machine or on three different machines. This affectingly means the consumer is buying a digital product that would essentially become useless sooner or later.

With my order a mere sixteen days out before getting into my hand, this is the last thing I wanted to hear as a consumer. Most of the time, I'm not that educated on a product. I doubt anyone really is unless they specialize in what they are going to buy, like the video game community often does. I, on the other hand, am a casual gamer. I play for enjoyment and escape. Finding out this makes my consumer confidence drop like a rock in a pond. My concern now is not if my machine can run the game, but if the game will hurt my machine.

And I don't exactly have enough money on me to buy a laptop specifically designed for Spore and nothing else, which would be the safe route to take.

Finally...

My mother recently pointed out during my sister's boyfriend's third dinner with us that she's noticed an increase in how often I sleep. I've fallen asleep on the car rides home from school, on the car rides to and from work, and immediately after doing a pretty simple and non-labor intensive task like depositing my check or walking the dog. I've been spotted nodding off during breakfast at the store over my onion bagel. My eating habits have slowed down dramatically at the table, as I am now one of the last people to finish eating instead of one of the first. Even now, while I'm typing this, I'm fighting to stay awake just so I can be cognitive enough to complete this thought.

She wants to know if I am sick, but after one-and-a-half months of that mysterious flu bug, I am no longer sure what being healthy feels like these days. All I know is that I'm spending less time doing the things I want to do and more time sleeping.

By the way, this blog took thirty minutes to type, which is about average for this long of an entry. And now, after I spell check this, I'm going to bed.