Category: Other and blather

These are the people in my internet*: Enrico Casarosa

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Related to some thinking I’ve been doing about the ways in which I have used, and do use, the internet, and also related to the fact that the 2012 Oscar ceremony took place last night…

I don’t care much about the Oscars (hey, cynicism and also a complete lack of opportunities to watch movies in the past year), but I did happen to have an arbitrary bias toward the Pixar short La Luna (which I haven’t seen) in the best animated short film category.  Not due to any sort of clairvoyant knowledge about the relative strengths of the competitors in that category, but just because it was directed by one Enrico Casarosa.

In the early-to-mid ’00s, Casarosa was an active member of the Flight forums, a very active (but currently eerily quiet, following publication of the eighth and final volume of Flight anthologies) community of comics creators (with dabblers like me at the periphery). He coordinated the First World Wide SketchCrawl drawing marathon in November 2004. People in different countries spent the day out drawing, alone or in groups, and shared results on the SketchCrawl forum. I joined in, in my solitary way, heading into Cambridge with sketchpad, pencils, water brush, and pocket watercolour set in my MEC carry-all bag.

Here’s me in November 2004, about to come down with the flu:

(I notice those are the shoes I wore today.)

I sketched for a few hours. A lot of my watercolours were blotted off the sketches by rain-soaked opposite pages in the sketchbook.

I did that one inside Starbucks. So the paint stayed on.

That night I uploaded my work to share and perused what others had created. Then, having spent the day standing around in the cold and wet, I succumbed to a miserable flu and have never felt up to joining a SketchCrawl event again. However, I have always admired Casarosa’s leadership in setting up a framework and inspiring people to take part. The 34th World Wide SketchCrawl took place in January this year.

Fast-forward to the past year. Casarosa blogged a day-in-the-life series of posts on the process of making La Luna, and he gave a peek at the experience of being nominated for an Oscar on Twitter (@sketchcrawl). His tweets share some of the magic of his work (including “bloopers,” or incorrectly-rendered images from the computer-animated film), the wonder of being a dad, and an all-around happy attitude that I resonate to. It doesn’t hurt that he makes a point of enjoying his commute on a nice Bianchi bicycle, complete with old-school toe clips.

(I think I coloured this one on the computer. There was a ceremony for turning on the Christmas lights in Cambridge that evening.)

As it turns out, La Luna didn’t win the Oscar, but it’s one short film I’ll make a point of seeing.

*Yes, this is a reference to this.

Freak summer weather

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Here’s what it looked like a couple of weeks ago:

Cool, misty, snowed-upon and sheep-infested. Actually, the sheep are still there. And I have nothing against them. I was just reaching for adjectives. Actually, they are quite smelly. But I can deal with it.

This man was throwing snowballs for his dog to chase. Sort of. He wasn’t that great at making snowballs.

Fast-forward to today:

OK, so you can’t really tell the temperature from this pic. You’ll have to trust me (or just check a more trustworthy internet source). It was warm. I swear that tree is thinking hard about generating some buds.

The sky was a brilliant blue that’s rare enough even in summer to catch my attention. Usually by 10am on any given day there’s at least a saturation-sucking haze and some solid clouds.

I haven’t seen colours this brilliant in months. It was in the mid-teens Celsius. If this was Canada (except Vancouver) everyone would be going delirious and going out in shorts and T-shirts. In Vancouver half of them have been wearing their shorts all winter but they might be squinting a bit at the sunlight. Any minute now all the plum trees are going to explode like popcorn into fluffy blossom-festooned things.

I seem to have been a bit myopic in my selection of photographic subjects today. It is still February and we are well into the northern hemisphere, so the sun is still slanty and despite the absence of snow, the real difference, aside from details, is difficult to capture on camera.

It’s supposed to cool off again now. That’s OK. We got away with something today.

 

Colourful language.

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To me, the purest purpose of an expletive is to convey that a feeling is so strong that it cannot be expressed in our normal words (whether this is an accurate assertion is a different argument).

Tonight, Baby W was complaining about something, possibly that she was too warm, so I took her out of her sleeping bag. As I hastily undid the shoulder snaps, I felt myself tugging a hair at the back of her head. I braced myself as, for a brief, silent moment, she absorbed what had just happened. Then she let loose a heartrending cry that expended all the air in her lungs and kept on going, soundlessly. She loaded up on air again for a forceful scream, followed by lots of swearing.

I’m pretty sure that babies swear.

I heard it when G was tiny, and I’m hearing it again with W. Normal crying is mostly vowels. Sometimes she says the classic “waaaah” when she’s pretty upset. But when she really gets mad, like she did tonight, she breaks out some more consonants, mostly “m,” “n” and “g,” and utters strings of miserable syllables. It tells a story of shock, misery, anger and betrayal, and it goes on for a while. Betrayal being a relatively new thing to her, she feels it keenly.