Hey look I did a thing

I don't remember the last time I've had enough hair (and the inclination) to do anything with it.

It's messy as hell, but I'm down with messy.

The answer is highlight clipping. Do it.

Thursday night. Working on glare (lens flare) and caustics (light reflections off shiny objects).




Looks pretty good.

Trying it out on glass materials. Nice caustics, no glare.



Trying again.

Trying again.

Trying again.

Still not working. Maybe it's the caustics in the way?



Still not working.

Maybe it's the glass. Back to chrome.



Still not working. Completely unable to replicate image I made a few hours before.

Friday morning, glare is back. And on glass!



Now glare with caustics?

No.

Just glare again?

No.

Caustics first, then glare?

No.

Friday evening. I am still trying.



And it WORKS. Everything. All together.

It even works TWICE IN A ROW, from scratch.



I had my exposure curves set to preserve highlight detail. Except for glare to work, there needs to be blown-out highlights. I must have adjusted it once, without remembering, and never set it back right.

The end.

sad

I think that most of the people I know are better friends with each other than they are with me, and it makes me sad. It isn't because of them. They like me fine. I think I'm not doing things right. I keep people at a distance. I feel like, I lived so long in such isolation, just me and Mike, that I've forgotten how to do anything else. I thought I'd changed. I go out; I have friends. But I didn't change enough because I'm more honest in this blog than I am in real life. In real life, there is always the shrug and eye-roll, the veneer of nonchalance.

Now and Then My Country

My apologies. I am nostalgic tonight.

A series of events:

At 9:30 this morning I listened to a student explain to his class what a “mosh pit” was.

A line in a play. My voice with no air behind it, just my heartbeat pushing it through.

Feeling the limits of motion I have made for myself. I am so timid these days.

I traded in, traded up, grew up. I no longer wear home-made shirts that declare
TESTOSTERONE KILLS BRAIN CELLS
SUPPORT ABORTION
or
BEWARE OF GOD, but I also don’t raise my voice, not intentionally anyway. When I stopped looking at my body, I also stopped doing anything that might cause anyone else to look. I discovered inhibition and called it restraint. I wasn’t always afraid of looking stupid. I have taught myself fear and called it reason.

At 11:45 I realized that my 10 year college reunion will happen this year.

A girl with long, straight, hair, and her shirt buttoned just one button off. I am stuck with an image of myself, jeans and a flannel shirt and no shoes. The shirt is a reddish-brown plaid, heavy and slightly scratchy. I took it out of my father’s closet; it is too small for him and too big for me. I am not wearing a bra. I still think that no one can tell. I feel such a strange, wry, affection for this girl, who I envy and pity, who just doesn't know yet.

wanting

That's why I am so offended when I am told that I am the "least motivated person [she] knows." Because everything that I am proud of, everything that I care about, is wiped away by that sentence. They no longer exist. If, as I believe, success = motivation + willpower + forces out of our control, then without motivation there is no success. First one must want, and then one must try, and then, if one is lucky, one gets. Without motivation, everything I have done is something that simply happened. It was not willed or wanted, it just was. So all of the things I am happy about today? I didn't do anything to make them happen. I didn't even want them.

All of the things I am proud of from the last four years -- the going back to school, uprooting my life and making a new one, trying over and over, despite constant failure, to date, learning how to confront substantial addictions and eating disorders and be healthy for the first time in my 30 years of life, finding the courage to show people the ugliest parts of myself because I think it should be done, graduating with the best grades I've ever gotten in my life, trying and trying and trying and finally succeeding in getting a job in my field in a place I'd like to stay, in a community I've built around me-- I believe that I wanted these things. I believe if I didn't want them, they wouldn't have happened.

To suggest that I am unmotivated is to negate all of that. Either it didn't happen the way I think it did, or it happened, it just isn't very much. It shows motivation, but so much less than everyone else. So my accomplishments aren't negated, just diminished. They are worth less, somehow, than those around me. I am diminished, and I do not like it.

twinkle, twinkle, stomp

Yesterday Felicia told me that she's been using one of my essays in the class she teaches, and one of her students wrote an amazing essay in response to mine, and when praised, the student said, "I only did it that way because Angela did it that way."

Today I finally got the code figured out. I have a subway system that knows when you're underground, and if you're underground, it knows what car you're standing in, and can take you with the car when it moves, and let you get off the car at the next stop. I figured it out by myself, by putting together badly written on-line tutorials, and guessing and checking and guessing again, because everyone else -- including the professor -- said it couldn't be done. And I fucking did it. Have I told you how much I hate coding? I stayed late, and I came in on weekends, and I CODED that fucker.

And when I showed Monica, she said, "You know, in a few years we're going to need a new faculty member. You should start putting your work out."

I finally got through to the parts of File Maker I needed, so now I've got that started. And I've been redesigning the categories and it feels like a fresh, better start. I already have a dozen more charts in mind. I think it's going in the infographics fad kind of way, and I think I'm done fighting it.

At HSF I remembered what it felt like to feel really, bodily, good. So I've been tweaking back my bedtime and tweaking forward my waketime, and adding more walking to my day.

a complete list of adjectives I have used to describe myself to strangers, and how often I have used them

(click on image for full size)

Someday to be a web page with rollover captions.