Animation Isolation Day 8; not so great

Actually, it was fine. I just like rhyming The hard part was I decided to shelf my "head" animation until after my demo reel is done. Hard because I've already burned four days working on this one plus some time at Gobelins but it's over 30 seconds long which puts it closer to short territory.

Realistically, it needs 2-3 weeks of work to finish and I don't really want or need a new 30 second long piece for my demo reel right now, nor do I want to spend the whole month on one animation. I had some ideas to trim out some unnecessary and tricky parts but it only saves about 6-7 seconds so I conceded to cut my losses (for now) and shelf it. Tomorrow I'm going to get back to another Gobelins exercise: the suitcase! I'm limiting myself to 5-7 seconds for this one. I also made myself a calender so things hopefully don't spiral out of control again.

After banging my head on the wall with this decision, I decided I should get out for a bit, since I haven't left the apartment other than to job or buy groceries in over a week. SO I set off into town with a mission: watch "Inception". Tricky thing about Germany is that they still love to dub English movies. Some places show the original versions but it seems to be the smaller, artsier theaters.

When I came to rent this apartment, I was explaining a little bit about me and my ways to the guy I'm renting from. He asked why I didn't have a smartphone and went on to evangelize his jailbroken iPhone, with it's GPS and city maps and all that good stuff. It make me think... maybe maps, mobile internet and a GPS might improve the quality of my life.

I was thinking about that alot as I walked around for 7 hours today. I like walking around new cities; I get a feel for things and a genuine sense of direction that doesn't depend of signal strength or battery life. I stumble upon things that aren't on the map. For example, today's batch including a guy talking to me about how he can't go to government for money because they'll lobotomize him and that Köln is a city of light that calms his soul, a ten police car response to a catfight between some Turkish girls and some punk rocker girls, drank a Kölsch with some live music in a smokey old jazz bar and walking into the middle of a carnival and realizing The Gay Games are apparently the big event for Köln this week. I don't know what the Gay Games are exactly are but there were an awful lot of foreign, gay men in town.

The wandering approach does take a long time and isn't foolproof, especially if you are actually trying to be somewhere at a certain time to do a certain thing. I walked an awful long way back to one of the big cinemas when I decided to see a late show of Inception and waited in a queue for 15 minutes to find it was German only. I walked another 45 minutes and finally found the English theater, where I'd missed the start of the film by an hour and a half.

So the days goals were both kind of a wash but I did get to get out, see some more of the city, walk a bazillion miles (don't jog in the morning if you're going to walk all damn day!!! My legs hurt way more than they should) and just wander like I like to do. And now I know when and where to see "Inception" in English.

I think I would still do most of those random things with a Smartphone though. I'll be pricing them tomorrow. My iconoclasm says buy an Android because Apple evangelists annoy the shit out of me but a jailbroken, last gen iPhone is also kind of punk rock. How does an Android compare to a jailbroken iPhone anyway? Apps? Accessories?