A Couple More Things

By sovknight | March 30, 2008

I’m sorry that I keep writing these rant-type posts complaining about things.  Unfortunately I seem to be good at bitching, and I need to get it out of my system.  I have a list started of upcoming topics, so look for new non-bitchy material soon.  In the meantime…

Spaceships

Curse whoever decided that spaceships have to have little glowing engine exhausts.  Arrgh! 

So you probably wonder why I would care about that.  Well, in my spare time, I’m a reasonably accomplished CG artist.  At least on a very independent, small scale.  Recently I offered to do some CG for a guy making a student film.  He’s entered a competition and he’s got some talent, so I figured I’d help him out with some outer-spacey-type spaceship shots he had written into his script.  OK, fine.  No problem.  That is, until the very end when I realized I’d have to rotoscope all the engine exhausts onto the little spaceships by hand, frame-by-frame, one at a time.  It took me two days, and when I finally viewed the end result, I didn’t quite have them all lined up right from frame to frame.  Well, I’m not doing it over.  Screw that.  I started over enough times early on when I realized some mistakes I made.  Plus I had to develop a whole new complex Photoshop method to do it.  I’m not about to throw two days worth of unpaid work away for a couple jittery lights.  Still, I do suppose it would be hard to boldly go forth and conquer new worlds and new civilizations when your armada sputters through space with engine problems.  Ah well.  I call it done.

People on MySpace

Specifically, people who set their profiles to “private” so other people can’t look at them.

OK.  I’m only going to explain this once, so listen up.  Myspace is a social networking web site. You create a profile on Myspace so you can network socially.  By that, I mean meet new people and discover things that you might have in common with them.  I met one of my best friends through MySpace, and without her, I’d be insane from the boredom and uber-conservative nature of living in Salt Lake City.  I might do something crazy like go out in public on Sunday or drive near the speed limit.  MySpace is about meeting people, and when you set your profile to “private”, you’re completely missing the point.  “I must be your friend to view your profile.”  What is that?  How am I supposed to know if I want to be your friend if I can’t view your profile?  Sure, you look like a hottie in the one tiny picture I clicked on because you piqued my interest, but I’ll never know for sure because I can’t see any of your other pictures or learn about you in any way.  If you have some stalker after you or something, I’m pretty sure you can ban a specific member.  You don’t have to ban everyone else.  Who do you think you are, MySpace Profile Set to Private person? 

Environmentalists

I touched on this in my previous post under the header of “Some of the Things I Don’t Understand“, so I won’t go into detail here, but the Tree Huggers are really getting to me lately.  Yes, I’m aware that a giant iceberg broke off the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica, and that the entire shelf is set to go any minute, but you know what?  Who cares?  I don’t.  So what?  Shit like this happens all the time.  We need to deal with it instead of making up reasons behind it.  Bigger icebergs have broken off in the last decade or two.  That’s part of living on planet Earth.  We humans account for such a tiny little infinitesimal impact on the planet that I’d be surprised it even notices we’re here.  Trust me, me driving back and forth to the grocery store in the gas-hogging, pollution-spewing Oldmanmobile didn’t cause the bloody iceberg to fall off.  Nor did any of the other six billion people here.  It fell off because that’s what icebergs do when the Earth heats up, and the Earth heats up because that’s what the Earth does on occasion, humans or no.

I was reading this blog earlier today where this tool was describing several ways we could “save the planet”.  Among my favorites was using the search engine “Blackle“, because apparently using a search engine with a black screen takes less energy to produce a picture than one with a white screen.  And that’s good for the environment.  Another was not eating meat for lunch.  I will quote for impact:

“Many people are not aware that the meat industry causes more damage to the environment than all the cars and airplanes put together. The massive amounts of land that are cleared for farming, the food produced for the cows to eat, the trucks needed to move them around, the gas that the cows fart out… it is all very bad for the environment.”

C’mon people.  I am SO not giving up my cheeseburger for your stupid environmental concerns.  If I’m wrong, and Burger King is the harbinger of global destruction, you’ll still have to pry the Whopper out of my cold, dead hands while all the oceans rise and the rain forests turn to desert and the Cubs win the World Series and all the other signs of the apocalypse occur.  I’ll be over here making spaceships on my computer,  blogging with my white-screened Wordpress template, stewing about MySpace morons, and chowing down on a nice juicy steak while giving Al Gore the finger.

Haha.  I’ll see you next time.