Yosemite trip sucked!

last modified: Friday, August 26, 2005 (12:38:37 AM CST)

Nic and I were invited to a friends wedding at Yosemite so we decieded to turn it into a mini vacation.
Unfortunately all I remember doing for four days was driving. First was the six hour drive there. Anytime you wanted go somehere in the park, you had to take the whiniest roads ever, and thanks to the Park buses and the motor homes were going 20mph! A 35 mile destination took an hour and a half to get to. We were driving around 3 hours a day. We were so beat up from driving these curvy roads once we got to our destinations we couldn't really enjoy it.
If I ever go to Yosemite again it will be off season in the winter.

An Inspirational Poem, Part Deux

last modified: Sunday, July 24, 2005 (4:15:26 AM CST)

Drying on the wire
A spring-fresh scent desired
Laundry happens once a week
Tide with Color Safe Bleach

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

May you find your inspiration
Fore it is there
Even in your underware

-In "Beastie Boy" Fashion-
And the hits keep coming and they won't stooooop! Al & Nic are coming to rock the sure shot! Boiiee! Word to your mother!

If you don't know, you better ax somebody!

War of the Worlds SUCKED!!!

last modified: Wednesday, July 20, 2005 (4:27:40 AM CST)

This is an attempt to save you $10 a head at the theater. As the title suggests this movie with the big names like Tom Cruise/Steven Spielberg was down right crapy.After watching this movie you feel like you walked into the movie an hour late. No background story and nothing is explained about the invading aliens. It feels like watching the final episode of a long running TV series. The attempt at deepening the story by creating an emotional conflict between a father and son fails miserably.
That's $25, I could have put towards a cel. Spoken like a true cel collector.

An inspirational Poem

last modified: Tuesday, July 19, 2005 (4:10:39 AM CST)

Salty are the nuts
Hotdogs for lunch
Pickles I hunch
Are marinated cucumbers


Need I say more?
Further inspirations will follow.

Response to the poll

last modified: Monday, April 25, 2005 (10:21:20 PM CST)

Here is an idea. I was thinking about personalizing a t-shirt with the start-up page of my gallery in the back and name of the gallery in the front. If everybody that attends the expo or the get-together makes a shirt of their gallery all the rubberslug members would be able to recognize eachother.
I am pretty sure everybody is familiar with the iron-on sheets they have at any craft store. All you do is put the sheet in the printer and print out whatever you want and iron it onto the shirt.
If everybody had the same format on their shirts they would look more official and easier to spot.
Let me know what you think.

What's the future of cel collecting?

last modified: Sunday, November 28, 2004 (6:04:47 AM CST)

Does anybody know the ratio of the cost between a cel animation and CG animation. CG animation better be something like 1/10th the cost. Otherwise there is no excuse for it. The whole anime industry in Japan seems like it's turned to CG animation.
What is the reaction of the anime fans in Japan ? Is it all the same to them? How about all the cel collectors in Japan? Are they such a minority? From my understanding everybody that is into anime, is also a cel collector in Japan. If the collectors are making a fuss are the studios that detached from their audience?
It seems like its more about money then ever before, in the anime industry.
Do you really lose so much money in doing cel animation? For example Miyazaki. Anything he has his hand in, turn to gold. Cels from any one of his movies cost an arm and a leg. A good example of this is Princess Mononoke. The movie is made up of 170 thousand cels, plus backgrounds. Less then decent cels from the movie go for couple of hundred dollars. Decent ones for thousand plus and good ones tens of thosands of dollars. The most expensive one I personally saw went for $22000. If you had seen it, you would know that that is not the best cel in the movie by far. That tells me that there are cels that are alot more expensive than that. O.K let's do the math. Let us be EXTREMELY CONSERVATIVE and say that the average price of a cel from Mononoke is $100. Money made from the selling the cels would be 17 million dollars. Let's be A BIT more realistic and say $200 per cel on the average. That's 34 million bucks not counting backgrounds sketches, rough sketches, etc.I know that every cel cannot be sold individually because they could be bits of pieces of bigger image but that shouldnt change the total because I am not counting the money that could be made from backgrounds sketches, rough sketches, etc. Let me know if I am missing something.