Bleeah

I CANT THINK OF ANYTHING TO WRITE ABOUT. My life has slowed to a repetitive crawl. Now, I don't suddenly hate school or anything, but it hasn't been getting any more interesting, that's for sure. Even Flash runs slowly on my computer now, making me, an impatient person, generally annoyed and not animating much. So production on my movies is slow too. Sloowww...

Comic Con!

I went to the Stumptown Comics Fest today. It was located near downtown Portland, in a hotel. It was basically a huge gathering of local comics artists and comic shops, selling and displaying things. There were all manner of underground comics, one-panel cartoon cards, and manga. There were a few things there that were especially interesting, such as the character Onion Head Monster. Watch the above video to get a general idea of who Onion Head Monster is. It may take a while to load, but it's worth it.
I also bought this awesome brochure that was labeled "For Your Safety". This guy was selling a bunch of them. Basically, they have a diagram on each leaf that shows two pictures of a situation: what to do and what not to do. I, of course, got the one with the ninja. The top illustration shows a ninja breaking into an office building with his sword out, with an X next to the picture. The bottom illustration, accompanied by a checkmark, shows a woman pinning a nametag on the ninja in the lobby. It's generally awesome.

Scupper me chips, it's an update

Hello all, and welcome to the Occasional Update of The Yokai's Blog. Thank you for reading.
Well, as for school, it's been alright. I enjoy school, but absolutely HATE a. getting up in the morning and b. doing homework. Most of the teachers are okay, except the math and advisory teachers, who are jerks. I'm making some friends there as well, which is nice.
Otherwise, I'm even closer to finished with "A Grain of Sand", I recently upgraded all the art in it, so the scenery looks much better now. It should be done soon. As for the clay movie, I don't know when I'm even gonna get started on that...I have so many plans for Flash...now I'm wishing I didn't spend $145 on the animation program, which isn't the greatest anyway. But "Sand" will be done soon, and it's gonna be awesome.
Speaking of movies, I've found some really awesome animations on Newgrounds. I really like Flash movies with a lot of action. Not necessarily violence, but with a lot going on. You'll see what I mean if you watch these masterpieces.

The YuYu is a truly amazing work by a retired Disney animator, with great music.

Future is a music video for a Japanese techno song. It looks 3D, but was done with just flash.

Metropolis Circuit Is like a combination of the previous two. Two people race each other through a futuristic city.


And finally, today is Talk Like A Pirate Day! Arr! Hence the title, me hearties.

The first day of school

It was the first day of school today. Only the freshmen showed up, because since they were all new to the school this was the day to get to know the place, and familiarize themselves with the classes. I'm taking honors English and Global Studies (Whose teacher is a very witty African- American guy with a black belt in Tae Kwon Do and a concealed weapons license--I can only imagine what the year will be like with him), Algebra, PE, Health Ed, Spanish, Physical Science, and a video production class.
The teachers all seem nice enough, although I can't say the same for the students, who generally kept to themselves. That's probably only because not very many of them know each other, hopefully it will get better over the year. Generally, though, things look pretty good. The classes don't seem too boring, there doesn't appear to be a huge homework load, and I can find the classrooms relatively easily. I just hope I still have some free time during weekdays.
So that's how things were. Tomorrow, everyone else will show up and regular classes will start , so then I'll really get to see what high school is like.

Eclipse!

Most of you already know this, as I don't think I have any readers other than from the west coast, but there was a total lunar eclipse two days ago. It was at 2:00 am, so I didn't get much sleep, staying up until 3:30 to watch it. My mom and brother came outside to watch, as well. It took about an hour to fully cover up, and when it did, the moon turned a beautiful shade of orange. It looked like Mars was orbiting Earth or something. Although it kind of sucks, here's a picture we took:
Not much else has happened, except I got into honors classes for Parkrose High, I'll be taking honors English and Global Studies, so that's pretty cool. Usually, you need teacher recommendations from the previous year to get in, but all I had was an essay I wrote, and the accepted it! I guess I'm a genius or something :P
Oh yeah, and some random Chinese guy IM'd me the other day. He thought I was a transfer student or something. His English wasn't very good, and it took half an hour or so to get him to realize he was talking to the wrong person :)
That's all that's happened recently.

Sand and sun and all that

We went to the beach yesterday, for the day. The weather was pretty much perfect. The nice thing about Oregon beaches is that they're rarely too hot. They can certainly be too cold, but yesterday it was perfect. We were going to go to Arcadia Beach, which is one of the best in northern Oregon, with tide pools, caves, and a little stream that trickles into the ocean out of a forested mass of plants. Unfortunately, it's everyone else's favorite beach too, ad there was absolutely nowhere to park.
So we went about a mile south, and encountered a different, smaller beach. It was definitely less crowded, so we parked and walked down. There was plenty of room to put down a blanket. We hung out for a while and my mom and I started noticing something odd. A large number of pelicans were flying north. There was a steady trickle of the birds all day. Now why would pelicans be flying north in late summer? We have yet to figure it out.
Eventually, we hauled out the kite that we had bought earlier in the year. I was surprised by how well-made it was. It was a nice kite, quite a bit better than the $1.50 plastic kites we usually get. It flew quite well in the wind, and I learned how to twirl it when it started to drop, so as to keep it in the air.
As the tide went out, a stretch of dry ground opened up in front of the cliff at the north end of the beach. I decided to walk around the cliff to see if there was anything there, and there certainly was. There was a whole other beach there, slightly smaller and only accessible at low tide. A small but very wide waterfall trickled down from a huge mass of rock attached to the eastern cliffs, and proceeded to create a wide stream that emptied int the ocean.
I climbed up over the waterfall and found that the stream wound through a forested gap in the cliffs. I would have kept going but I wasn't wearing any shoes, and the rocks were starting to get pointy.
We stayed there most of the day, and spent much of the evening in Cannon Beach. This included eating at a so-so restaurant and bar, getting ice cream, me going into the most horrifying public bathroom in the state(toilet paper splattered on the walls and ceiling) and watching the sunset while it was cloudy. We started home at about 6:30. All in all, I quite enjoyed the day.

Movies

I've been getting more productive with my movies recently. I currently have two projects going. one is a Flash animation called "A grain of sand". It's about a little man with strange powers who is created out of thin air for absolutely no purpose whatsoever, and decides to explore the surrounding landscape. (the picture is a screenshot from that.)
My other movie is a claymation, the title is undecided. It's about a psychopath who wears a mango on his head and smashes houses with a giant club. Meanwhile, the local police force tries to stop him. The flash animation will be finished soon, the other will take longer.
You can see some of my older flash movies here:
The Refrigerator is one of my first flash movies, so it isn't very good. Sketchy Fight was something I tried later, focusing more on fluid animation then art quality, and Transmutation is an abstract movie about things changing shape. Enjoy! (Or don't. Maybe they suck.) :P

Cheesecake Factory

Last night we went to the Cheesecake Factory, the most ludicrously glitzy restaurant in the state. The architecture was horrifying mash of classical Italian and ancient Egyptian, if you can even imagine that, and the storefront itself was about 40 feet high. There was only one story, so about 20 feet of that was wasted space for the vaulted ceilings painted with hieroglyphs.
Amongst the 500 other people there we finally found a place to sit. It was on their patio, with a lovely view of the 700-car parking lot. We opened our menus to find them filled with ads for diamonds and spas and the like. That's right, adverts in the menus. I don't think there was a single thing there that cost under $7.00. But the only reason we'd come here in the first place was to spend a gift card my grandparents had given us, so we were good to go. I got a $10 burger, my little sister got an $8 quesadilla. My brother had a $1o pizza, etc. etc.
When my food came I was amazed to find a burger so large that, once I had out it all together, it was about 6 inches high. I sort of dislocated my jaw to take a bite or two, but when I was half done, everything just squirted out the back because of the pressure I was putting on the front of the bun. The food wasn't bad, but I came away from this experience glad that there would be no reason to ever go back there again. :)

Party on!

It's my birthday today. I'm fourteen. Cripes. I still find it hard to believe. It was pretty low-key, I didn't have a party or anything. My parents gave me an awesome T-shirt with an Asian dragon on it. The shirt is white and the dragon is red, and my grandpa said I looked like a Chinese food takeout box. It's true, ha.
I went downtown with my friend Hannah who's moving to Indiana, which sucks. She'll be gone for THREE FREAKING YEARS. We'll be 17 when we see each other again. Unfortunately, we were both too lame to think of anything to do, so we had coffee and watched "Harry Potter" and went home. It rained, too, which it hasn't done since I was born. But we went out to dinner and it was all cool.
In other news, I'm reading the final Harry Potter book. It's well written, but not really worth all the hype. Really it's just another HP book. Some people were so obsessed that they wrote an entire, 200-page book about what would happen in Book 7. Ridiculous. :P

Over the last two weeks...

Quite a bit has happened. I'm just a loser who doesn't write much...

On the 28th, I went over to Anders' house with a whole bunch of other homeschoolers to meet this guy named Travis Zariwny. His favorite phrase is "That's totally rad, man" and he works as a set designer and cameraman for various film companies, but makes movies on his own as well. He wanted to meet us and make a movie with us, which I think is totally awesome. The details aren't exactly clear, but there's no way I'm missing this.
On the 4th, we of course went to see fireworks. We went to Blue Lake county park, where they have a huge fireworks display every year. We'd gone last year as well and it was really cool, but this time there were at least six thousand people there, and the park's only so big. We had to settle for a bumpy hillside covered in blackberry vines on which to have our picnic. Better than nothing. There really was no where else to sit.
The display was nice, we watched it with some friends of ours. It got a little bit boring after a while, but I noticed something cool. The big ones are launched far enough away that there's a noticeable delay between when it goes off and when you hear it. The light hits you before the sound. It was helpful in a way, because there were some that they launched that made a very small explosion, basically a white flash followed by some sparks, but they were crazy loud. The light/sound delay gave us enough time to wince and cover our ears.
On the 5th, I went to Anders' house again, with some of his friends, to say goodbye to Travis as he is going away for a month to work on some horror movie in Hollywood. The party was held on a dock, at the Willamette river, at midnight. First time I've had a party on a dock at midnight. How awesome is that?
We slept over at his house. In the morning, we went outside and set off all of the fireworks he hadn't used. I finally let my retarded teenagerness take over for a while, and we took a bunch of little plastic soldiers and blew the crap out of them. We had too much fun. The finale was a "battle" between firework tanks. Little did I know Anders had doctored mine so that it had a large amount of extra gunpowder inside. I lit the fuse, and the tank fired off and then went up in flames. But Anders' tank shot forward while doing a barrel roll, twirled, landed upside down, and exploded spectacularly. So it was a draw. Anders took some videos, which should eventually be on Youtube.
Here are some pictures:
Lily pads at Blue Lake. There was a small pond close to where we were, and I photographed it.

Relics of our pyrotechnic massacre. The guy in front got in between between the tank battle, and had to be picked up with a stick. His legs stretched out while he was stuck to it. It's hard to see, but the one to the far right was completely unharmed, save that his gun was bent straight down. In the middle is a victim of a small fire caused by crackling balls, the puddle on the left got shredded by a ground bloom flower, and the shapeless mass in the back is six of them fused together after being melted by a snake.

So that's what happened these past two weeks. Woohoo!